


Ornithologies

by tahariel



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angels, Angst, Blacksmithing, Blindfolds, Blindness, Fallen Angels, M/M, Mild Gore, Teaching, fall from grace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-19
Updated: 2012-07-19
Packaged: 2017-11-10 07:25:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 63,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/463718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tahariel/pseuds/tahariel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“How are you?” Charles shifts again, and he must be looking at the wounds because he hisses, sharp and birdlike, and there is a loud flap of feathers in the air that makes Erik want to weep, because Charles is still an angel and Erik is… not.</p><p>“Human,” he says, and turns his face away into the rough fabric of the cloak he’s been using as a pillow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. So much the stronger proved he with his thunder

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the XMFC Reverse Big Bang 2012.
> 
> Firstly, you HAVE to go look at [the simply astounding art of jamesorangecat](http://majorangecat.livejournal.com/1684.html), who throughout this process has been a cheerful, encouraging and delightful person to work with and has put up with me deliberately leaving her cliffhangers when I knew she would be reading it. The art is spread throughout the story but PLEASE also go and tell her how amazing she is!
> 
> Secondly, I could not have completed this without the superb last-minute beta work of teh incredibly talented Euphorbic, whose no-nonsense kindness kept me from falling into a despair spiral.
> 
> And thirdly, I hope you enjoy it!

 

  


 

 

 

 

**I**

 

There is a hand over his eyes.

“Don’t look,” Charles whispers, and Erik feels the thin straw-stuffed mattress shift under Charles’ knees as he balances over Erik’s prone body. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I’m already hurt,” Erik says, but he does not try to lift his lids from where the gentle pressure of Charles’ palm is pressing them down, eyelashes flickering against the skin.

He must have rolled onto his side during the night; his shoulderblades feel raw and crusted over with old and new blood where the scabs have broken open, a deep-rooted ache that fills his chest, as though something has been pulled out of him.

It has.

“How are you?” Charles shifts again, and he must be looking at the wounds because he hisses, sharp and birdlike, and there is a loud flap of feathers in the air that makes Erik want to weep, because Charles is still an angel and Erik is… not.

“Human,” he says, and turns his face away into the rough fabric of the cloak he’s been using as a pillow.

 

 

  
**II**   


 

Except he’s not, not really, not in the only way that would make this bearable.

 

 

  
**III**   


 

Later, Charles kneels behind Erik on the bed and wipes down his back with a soft, dampened cloth, moving slow and steady as he works. There is the shadow of a wing between Erik and the candle, guarding his eyes from the sharp candlelight when they are used to darkness; the angel hums as he works, and the weight of his body is familiar, straddling Erik’s hips and keeping him pinned even when he flinches away, when the places where his own wings used to be throb and lance him with intense agony, the muscles of his shoulders trying to flex appendages that are no longer there. 

They speak aloud, now, Charles’ mental voice too much for Erik’s newly acquired humanity.

“Hold still,” Charles says, and bends to one side to re-wet the cloth, a sound of dripping water as he wrings it out in the bowl he has scavenged from somewhere. Father alone knows where he has drawn the water from. “I need to get this clean.”

Erik keeps his face buried in the cloak, only the corner of his eye lifted enough to watch the silhouette of Charles on the wall, curved over and tending to his newfound frailty. “Why bother? I’ll only die anyway. It makes little difference if it’s now or eighty years from now. You and I both know that’s little more than an eyeblink.”

“Humans seem to think it matters.”

“Humans also kill each other by the hundredweight. It can’t matter that much.”

“I understand dying of an infection is unpleasant, and I would like to spare you what pain I can,” Charles says, and then there are lips on the nape of Erik’s neck where the tight curls of his hair are drenched in sweat, and a hand strokes the side of his face, the line of his brow, the soft bow of his temple and the angle of his jaw, stubbled now where it has never been before. “Just let me, Erik. Think of it as less than an eyeblink of my time, if you prefer, but let me.”

And Erik submits, lies as still as he can while Charles finishes up and spreads some thick ointment over the wounds - this, too, from elsewhere, and if it smells of Heaven then he does his best not to ask.

The room is small, warms quickly now that the angel has lit the fire in the grate and shut the wide-open window to keep the snow from blowing in. It’s almost cosy, despite being little more than a stablehand’s room, apart from the main farmhouse and used mostly for foaling season, not at all intended for the depths of midwinter. As it heats up the scent of old summer hay gets stronger, stale though it is; in the barn the animals shift and snore, the occasional sound of a hoof clipping wood or a low call. The blanket the humans gave him is old but thick, the roof above his head more than sufficient to his needs. He is - resentfully grateful, for the kindness of strangers.

Charles finally leaves off, wiping his hands clean on the wet rag. “You shouldn’t have tried to work this afternoon.”

“Have you been spying on me?”

“Watching out for you, perhaps.”

“Watching over me,” Erik says, and a bitter laugh curdles in his chest, somewhere between a chuckle and choking. “How apt.”

“Don’t, Serikel.” Charles - Carophon, Charillon, Charles - curls around him, knees tucked in tight against Erik’s sides and arms twining around his shoulders, belly bowed upward to keep from brushing against his back. “That’s not what I meant. Speaking is so imprecise - I just love you.”

“I love you.” Erik, no longer Serikel, wraps his long fingers around Charles’, grips the supernaturally warm hands tight in his own and shudders out a long, low breath. “I love you.”

“Don’t die,” Charles begs him, then, and does not let go.

 

 

  
**IV**   


 

“You have to go north,” Charles says after Erik has slept, when the sun is just slipping over the horizon, creeping along the ground like an outpouring of honey across the land and turning the snow outside soft pink for an instant before day arrives. He’s spooned against him in the bed, as close as he can get without hurting Erik, arm draped over his waist, holding him carefully. “When you’re better. Promise me, Erik.”

“Why north?” he asks, stays facing the wall as outside the birds start their dawn chorus, though in winter they are more cacophonous than musical, all the beautiful singers long since flown south for the season. Every cell in his body is begging him to roll over to look, the muscles in his limbs twitching and straining to turn, something he only wills down by fixing the consequences firmly in his mind. His jaw clenches so hard he starts to worry about his teeth cracking, grinding one against the other.

“Why not?” Charles asks, and covers Erik’s eyes with his hand again before pulling his head around to kiss him, breath sweet with clouds and ambrosia, a passionate wet press of mouths before he leaves.

 

 

  
**V**   


 

Erik goes north.

The kindly humans who took him in after finding him lying in the snow, clothing and flesh torn as though he had been set upon by eagles, seem genuinely sorry to see him go - Jacob shakes his hand firmly, with a strong grip, while Sarah packs the old sackcloth bag she has given him with food, wrinkled apples from the stores and a wedge of sharp cheese, a loaf of tough bread and a very little jam to go with it, which is so kind he almost but not quite manages to persuade her to keep it. 

He will not eat meat. Erik knows this puzzled them, at first, but they seem to have accepted it as an eccentricity, the same as they did not ask him any more questions about his injuries after the violent reaction it shook from him whenever they were mentioned, first self-loathing and then barely contained fury that had only been worked off by giving him an axe and letting him loose on the woodpile.

It’s been a month since they found him, one he has spent trying not to think, at first so focused on his pain that there was little left of him to do anything else; then, once Charles’ mysterious ointment had done its work, in losing himself in chores, in milking and chopping firewood and feeding animals that shy away from his touch, confused and afraid. Sarah had coaxed him in like a startled beast himself, leaving food for him to take and tending him with good grace when all he could do was pant, exhausted and unable to lash out any longer on the mattress Jacob and their son Josef had dragged him onto, alternately weeping and screaming until Charles had finally found him, fleshbound and helpless as a babe, and soothed him from rage into misery.

He cannot stay. Any longer spent here and he might become one of them in truth, forget the songs of distant suns and the face of God in favour of tilling fields and herding cattle morning noon and night.

“There’s nowt up north but bandits and more bandits, and mountain goats,” Jacob says gruffly as Sarah folds one of Josef’s shirts into the pack after the food, smooths the worn fabric fondly before adding a blanket to the pile. “Y’could stay here, lad. There’s space for you in the house - not in the stables, not now we know you better - and we can always do with ‘nother strong shoulder ‘round the farm. January’s a poor time to be travelling.”

“You’ve given me more than enough.” Erik takes the pack from Sarah with a nod of thanks, tries to find the right words to say. “Thank you,” he settles on eventually, and that seems sufficient; she leans up towards his face and he jerks back before he can stop himself, away from the kiss she was trying to settle on his cheek. When the human woman’s eyes well up with tears, however, he bites back the feel of his skin crawling and bends his head a little to let her leave her mark on him. “I - ”

She smiles wetly, clutching at her shawl and leaving go of him, finally. “You have to go, we know. You’re not much of one for words, Erik. Say farewell and that’ll be enough for us.”

He loosens his stiff-mantled stance enough to embrace her, carefully, as though she is something he might break, and then finally - finally - he walks out into the open air with the long walking stick he carved for himself during the long, claustrophobic month of his recuperation and heads into the hills, along the well-worn lane towards the road.

It’s strange to walk upon the land and see it from this perspective instead of from above, to turn his feet to the lumps and hollows of the earth beneath the thin leather soles of his boots - not intended to be walked in, more covering than container, made for flight instead of footfall. Even the sound of the frosted grass crunching with each step is new and unnerving, a crisp crackle of frozen leaves underfoot snapping and brittle with cold.

He looks back, once, before he passes into the valley between hills that will finally obscure the farmhouse, watches the smoke drift upward from the chimney and the small figure of Josef going toward the barn to feed the cattle, and for a moment when the man raises a hand to his distant figure he thinks about going back. It will be warmer there than travelling, and they would be happy for him to stay, it seems.

And yet.

He turns his face to the north, and the wind smells of snow. It’s as good a direction as any.

Walking is so _slow._

 

 

  
**VI**   


 

It’s harder to set a schedule without other humans to measure himself against; when to wake, when sleep, when eat and drink and when to start walking again. Erik learns these things by trial and error, spends a few nights out under the trees shivering before he works out the best way to stay warm, near exhausts his food before he remembers he will need more once that is gone and starts looking for places to acquire it.

It’s bewildering, this matter of being mortal, and mammalian, and human.

He had spent the first few days on Earth confused and awkward as a newborn, this strange new fleshy body making demands of him he did not know how to interpret - that he feed it, water it, empty it of waste (or, as he found to his disgust, it would empty itself, as it chose.) His spirit self had slammed into the ground - into meathood - with the force of Jupiter’s gravity behind it, like being sucked into a black hole, slowly becoming heavier and thicker and more solid as he fell, comet-like, from the heavens. Burnt by the rushing wind and stung by the contemptuous stars as he passed them.

His human body is disgusting.

It sweats and shits and pisses, and in order not to get it on himself he is required to _hold himself_ while he evacuates; it grows hair he is required to shave or cut to keep from tangling and it aches and stings and twinges constantly, a never-ending cascade of unpleasant sensations that he does not have the ability to ignore. Each new feeling is a torment, something new to catalogue about his human condition. Jacob and Sarah laughed at him, at first, when he was unable to coordinate these new limbs and fumbling like a newborn thing still wet behind the ears - only falling silent when he screamed wordlessly at them to leave him be, incapable at first of language.

Erik wept, then, to be a being of fire forced into an earthen shell, into literal feet of clay. To be able to become exhausted.

Now, he walks, and walks, and walks, in the chill December air, through fogs and rain and wind, huddles in the lea of trees at night wrapped up like a caterpillar in a cocoon with a rough-made fire made hastily and without skill, and if he is used to aching limbs and piercing cold then he resents this, too, with the singleminded focus that had got him into trouble in the first place.

 

 

  
**VII**   


 

Erik walks across the countryside without truly looking, for it is all the same - grey and brown and white and dead, at this time of year, leafless hedgerows and twisted branches black against the cloud-marbled sky. The roads are either frozen into adamantium sheets or dissolved into thick, cloying mud that threatens to suck the boots from his feet and leave him barefoot and shaking in the barren landscape.

It’s getting easier to move without compensating for wings, without checking the direction of the wind and sheltering his eyes from the glare of the low-risen sun and flicking away branches. Still, when he hears footsteps behind him on the road where nobody could be he obeys his first instinct and drops the pack, lashes out with his left wing to strike with the heavy elbowed joint where the bone is thickest. Erik remembers too late that he no longer has wings. He staggers on the verge of falling, curses aloud as the automatic shift of his weight for the impossible blow leaves him unbalanced and ungainly and open to attack.

Charles catches his shoulder and steadies him without a word, keeps carefully to Erik’s back where he cannot see anything more than a flicker of tunic, the hint of chestnut-brown hair under a diaphanous silk hood. An arm wraps around Erik’s waist and Charles pulls in close, solid against his back. It would be familiar, caring, if not for the way he keeps the bulk of Erik deliberately between them, rests his temple against the top of Erik’s spine and holds him there easily, shorter but infinitely stronger. Against the chill air Charles’ touch is like a brand, the long line of his body a welcome touch Erik has sorely missed, had not realised felt like another amputated limb until it is returned.

“Don’t turn around,” Charles says, and when Erik shivers from the dichotomy of cold chest and warm back Charles merely curls his wings around and forward to encircle them both, sweeping in the long grey feathers to overlap over Erik’s heart in a double embrace. “Hello, love.”

 

  


>

 

“Hello,” Erik says, and reaches behind himself to put his hands on Charles’ hips, curled around the delicate-seeming bones of him. His head tips forward and he lets his eyes slide closed, since there is nothing here to look at but Charles, and yet he can look at anything but Charles. 

Charles’ breath is warm on the back of his neck, through the scarf. “How have you been?”

“Human.” There are feathers brushing against his cheeks, against the backs of his fingers, soft and shifting. “You?”

“Lonely.” The angel turns his face, rubs his cheek against the bared skin where he has pushed the fabric aside. He clutches at Erik’s body with a quiet urgency that echoes Erik’s own. It’s been days, weeks, since the last time. “Let me walk with you a while?”

“Of course.” A hand tangles with his and Erik pulls it forward so he can kiss Charles’ knuckles, presses it for a moment above his heart before stepping forward out of the curve of those great wings. “I don’t have a lyre to play for you, Eurydice.”

He can hear the smile in Charles’ voice when he bends to pick up his dropped pack. “You’re a terrible musician. I don’t think you can cast yourself as Orpheus.”

Erik slings the pack back over his shoulder, and when he steps forward they walk together, along the empty winter road, hand in hand. The air is crisp and parts around his face as though cut with a knife, but where they touch he is warm; heat spreads up his arm from Charles’ grasp, radiant and following just behind, out of sight but near. Carefully, so carefully, he unhooks their fingers and links his arm around Charles’, elbow jutting out behind him to get an angle where they can cleave close to one another without his being able to see more than the very edges of Charles. Underfoot, old wheel ruts ripple the road surface, long since frozen rigid and threatening to turn an unwary ankle, along with the usual pits and potholes. He picks his way through them carefully, focuses his eyes on the ground so that he does not turn to look.

In his mind’s eye he traces the lines of Charles’ beloved face, goes over them again and again to make sure he does not forget the broad forehead, bright, inquisitive eyes, the warm invitation of Charles’ mouth when he smiles at Erik, delighted and private and perfect, always. Even already he can feel the precise angle of Charles’ jaw slipping away from him, memory imperfectly recalling the seashell curl inside Charles’ ear, the soft flush of his cheek.

“Icarus, then,” he says eventually, once they crest the next hill and the land is laid out before them like a patchwork quilt, all brambled black hedgerows and sleeping beasts lying in burrows underground, waiting for Spring.

It is white and brown and black and cream, stitched together with long lines of frozen streams and naked trees, and somehow instead of being rotten and dying it is beautiful in all its stark glory, now that Charles is here. “You lived,” Charles says after a long moment of silence, though his free hand comes up to trace very gently along the ridged line of Erik’s shoulderblade, just as scarred as the earth below their feet. “Thank Heaven.”

Erik snorts, and tugs the heavy wool of his scarf up around his chin, hiding the sour curl of his lip. “Something like that.”

They make their way down the hill, Erik slow and steady and Charles hopping from time to time with a quick flutter, unbound by gravity; at the bottom the road divides, the left veering off to the north and into the woods, the right headed east towards the plains country. Erik looks at both with equal disinterest; there is no particular reason to take either, other than to keep moving, to keep from settling anywhere long enough to have to reconcile himself to his situation.

“Go north.” Charles gives him a little nudge towards the distant treeline, away from the wide open spaces and towards the far-off mountains, at present only the smallest of triangles against the sky. “North, Erik.”

“Should I start wearing a bridle, so you can direct me more easily?” Erik closes his eyes so he can turn towards Charles, ignoring the way the other gasps and claps a hand over the tight-shut lids, protective and urgent. “What does it matter where I go? I’m a _human_ now, Charles. Before you know it I’ll be gone and you can get on with whatever it is you’re going to do for the rest of eternity without me. Don’t pretend this is going to be anything more than a final sorry instant to you. One day you’ll be too busy to come and find me and when you come back I’ll be ninety years old and rheumatic, without any memory of who I was and who you are. Or I’ll be dead and buried somewhere. You should forget about me.”

Charles makes an angry noise, and then he is kissing Erik on the lips, fiercely, hand falling away from Erik’s eyes to twine into his hair and force him to hold there. He pulls so hard that it forces tears, rubbing his whole body up against Erik’s, one long line of heat. “Never,” the angel hisses, and kisses Erik again, a hard push of mouths that ends in his teeth catching on Erik’s lower lip and making it sore and swollen. “You’re mine. How can you think I could - I won’t forget about you, I won’t just wander off for years and leave you alone - you’re mine, Erik, you’re mine,” and this time when his wings curl around their bodies it is possessive, cuts off escape, not that Erik is trying very hard.

“Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked,” he says when their mouths part, his hands clutching at Charles’ shoulders, cupping the strong spread of his wing joints where they erupt from the smooth line of his back, where the tunic and surplice have been cut open to accommodate them. Their bodies are leant up against one another, feet occupying the same ground, and he loves Charles so much it aches. The sensation is so like what he felt as an angel that he feels for a moment as though it might all have been nothing but a bad dream.

He learnt to dream only after he had learnt to sleep.

 

 

  


**VIII**  


 

Charles stays long enough for Erik to stop for the night, and they lie side by side for hours, hands tracing one another’s faces, the scarf tied around Erik’s eyes so he cannot forget himself and let his lashes lift, a long slowly widening sliver of love before the end of all things.

He runs his fingers along the soft skin of Charles’ lips, the indentation of his philtrum, the curling shape of his nose and the thick, strong lines of his eyebrows, feels the face he knows so well and sees it in a new way, through the minute shift of expression and texture and the peach-fuzz fur of it, and if none of it is Charles’ real self - if it is a simulacrum, a form he wears so that they can be together for a few stolen hours - then Erik cannot mind that, since he has not yet accepted that the body Charles touches in return belongs to him as anything more than a carnival costume, to be easily shrugged off if only he can find the laces.

“It’s so hard not to talk to you, really talk,” Charles murmurs, kisses Erik’s palm. “I can hear you but not speak - your thoughts sound different now, too.”

Erik touches the thin skin at Charles’ temples and tries to remember what it felt like to talk to Charles mind-to-mind, can only summon up memories of _closer_ and of intimacy, pulls him closer in a sudden fit of loneliness that Charles rolls into with a moan, easily acquiescing. They curl into each other, pant into each others’ mouths with as much urgency as ever they had before, and while even this is different, transfigured from spirit to flesh, Erik moans just as loudly, breathless and aching for touch. Charles’ wings mantle over the pair of them as he buries his face in Erik’s chest and kisses whatever skin he can find, leaves Erik gasping at the touch of the cold air, too cold for anything more. He is already dangerously chilled.

The warmth of Charles is necessary, and even when Erik dozes through kisses he is held close, blankets around them both keeping everything in between them.

“I have to go,” Charles whispers eventually, when the birds start calling out for dawn, working his mouth up to the lobe of Erik’s ear, lipping at the soft skin there. “Before they miss me.”

“I know,” Erik says, and turns his blindfolded head to meet him, once more. “North, you said?”

“North,” Charles replies, and when he gets up he wraps the warmth he is leaving behind in with Erik in the blankets, tight around his hunched shoulders. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Leave me a feather?”

“Of course.” There is a quiet sound of pain, then Charles leaves the feather resting by Erik’s cheek, and kisses him once more, once again, before leaving with a flap of wings that recedes into the sky faster than Erik can untie the scarf.

He leaves it where it is for a while, strokes the feather with his fingers, smooth and long as his forearm, softer than anything else he has. The tip of it is a little wet before the blood dries, flaking off and falling to the earth, where it vanishes into the leaf litter.

 

 

  


**IX**  


 

Erik walks into the next town he comes across, once he has worked himself up to the point at which the need to follow through is greater than his need to avoid humans.

There are plenty of villages along the road, full of bustling humans and their busy little lives, markets and inns and craftsmen, hives of conversation and community that Erik has been shying away from, uncertain and wrongfooted. Jacob and Sarah had become used to his - eccentricities, but he does not know how to relate to these people, who do not know how to relate to him. At first he’d skirted around the towns when he came to them, slogging cross-country to circle far from having to speak to anybody and hoping to re-find Charles, but he’s running desperately short on food - and his body tells him that he very definitely needs to acquire more, that it is a necessity he cannot ignore - and Erik’s been forced to accept that he’s going to have to walk through, into, these settlements as he comes to them, and buy or barter for sustenance.

His stomach rumbles as he passes the first of the buildings, as though passing comment on his decision.

The people he passes look at him warily, and Erik hunches his shoulders, tries to make himself look smaller, unthreatening - which is essentially true. Without his sword he is reduced to a thug, not a fighter, and without his old abilities he cannot compete with the town’s blacksmith, who is stood under the shelter of his forge teaching an apprentice how to make nails. 

Erik’s feet slow for the ringing sound of the hammer, the hiss of the forge and the rough gusts of the bellows pumping, and he watches with numb longing the hot metal, cherry red, striking against the nail header on the anvil before dropping sizzling into a waiting bucket of snow melt. Once it would have sung out to him, a harsh voice of iron’s history, of rocks and mining, of being refined from ore to impure metal; now he can hear it only as a far-away murmur, as though his ears have been stuffed with cotton.

“Can I help you?”

Erik jerks before he can stop himself, his eyes torn away from the metal to the curious face of the smith, looking back at him as he wipes the soot from his hands. The man is built like a mountain, arms as thick as Erik’s thighs rippling with hard-won muscle under the protection of his leather apron. “Just watching,” Erik says with a voice disused to speaking, gravelly and dried by silence.

The smith nods, stepping out from behind the anvil and waving at his apprentice to keep working. “You a smith?” he asks, with a quick glance up and down Erik’s strong frame, assessing. “You’re wiry, but you’ve the look to you.”

“Something like.” Erik allows himself a wry twist of the mouth as the lad takes the rod he’s holding back to the forge in the shadowed back of the smithy to reheat, swapping it out for another one that has been resting in the coals. “Far away from here.”

“Travelling?” At Erik’s affirmation the smith harrumphs, looks him up and down again, takes more time over it on the repeat, frowning thoughtfully. “Got a place to stay? Inn’s not much to look at, but it’s pricey.”

Erik winces, his vague ideas of a warm corner to sleep in dissipating like smoke. The bedroll has served him well enough so far, no doubt it will keep doing so for another night.

“Hmph. Thought as much,” the man says, running his fingers back through his grey-streaked hair before gesturing at the smithy. “Well, if you’re any kind of smith, if you can help Thomas here fill some buckets of nails, you’re welcome to a spot in here tonight. One blacksmith to another. It’ll be warm enough, and I dare say wife’ll scare you up some dinner, if you don’t mind apprentice work.”

And even Erik isn’t proud enough to ignore so generous an offer. “Not at all. Thank you.”

“S’nothing. Come put your pack in the back corner, should have a spare apron and gloves around here somewhere.”

The lad makes space for him at the front, and then there is just the ringing monotony of hammer on metal, their hammers starting out of sync with one another but falling into a rhythm almost of their own accord, until the reverberating song of striking iron is doubled. Erik is clumsy at first with the gloves on - he had never used them before, never needed to, as well burn the sun as burn his hands - but he gets the hang of it soon enough. The smith - Lucas - just nods and smiles and goes back to his own work, plough blades and awls, plain well-made tools that he heats and shapes, heats and shapes into usefulness with long-earned skill.

“I hate making nails,” Thomas confides while they’re restoking the forge, both of them at the enormous bellows forcing air into the flames, feeding them until they roar. “It’s so boring.”

“For want of a nail,” Erik says, not unkindly, and goes back to his hammer.

 

 

  


**X**  


 

The smith - Lucas - is as good as his word, and Erik eats with the three of them, the man, his wife and his apprentice, that evening, in the little kitchen in the back of the house attached to the smithy, everything about it neat as a pin despite the smell of burning coal and hot metal that has seeped into the very bones of the house, making it seem homely and familiar to Erik, sat on a wooden chair beside the fire. Dinner is rabbit stewed with root vegetables, hot and rich and filling. Erik picks around the meat, tries not to think about the juices that must have soaked into the parsnip and potato, knows little fragments of the softened flesh must have mixed in with what he has eaten. 

“Is everything alright?” Anna asks, frowning when she sees the rabbit left in his bowl, though Thomas is more than happy to take it off his hands when Erik hands it over, stabbing at the meat as though he’s had nothing to eat all winter.

“I - ” Erik hesitates, uncertain, then decides on a lie as the better course of action, though it pains him. “I took a vow to abstain from meat. It’s nothing to do with the food.”

“That’s no way to keep breathing in winter,” Lucas says harshly, and takes the bowl back from Thomas before the lad’s had half of it, pushing it back over to Erik. “Vow or no vow, you need some meat on your bones if you mean to keep hefting a hammer and not freezing to death. Far be it from me to tell a man what to do, but I’m telling you now, eat your damn rabbit.”

Erik looks at the browned flesh in his bowl, in its own juices, swallows down bile. “No. Thank you for your kind intentions, but no, I can’t.”

“Not eating the damn thing won’t unkill it, but it might kill you. Vows! What do they get a man but a hunger and the angels laughing at him for thinking God wants him to starve to death?” Lucas scowls, leaning his elbows on the old wooden table, which creaks under his weight. “God didn’t make a wolf to chew grass like a cow, and nor did he you. Man eats meat. Are you a man or a cow?”

“I’ll have it if you don’t want it,” Thomas says, still hopeful, but after another minute of wrestling with himself Erik picks up his spoon and takes his first bite of meat. It’s rich and thick and heavy, and he wants to be sick at the same time as he scoops up the next mouthful, forces it down and tells himself it doesn’t taste good.

It earns him the smith’s approval, a nod and a pat on the back from Lucas that nearly sends Erik sprawling across the table. “Good. When you’re done I’ll show you where you can sleep.”

 

 

  


**XI**  


 

That evening Charles sneaks into the hayloft where Lucas keeps the feed for Anna’s goats, his feet near-silent on the boards as he pads over to where Erik lays cocooned in the thick hay in the deep dark, blankets insufficient to keep the sharp ends from prodding and poking at him but enough to keep him warm. When he rolls over at the sound the scent of old summer rises from the rustling pile, and Charles lies down beside him without prompting, making a divot for himself in the hay. It’s too dark to see anything of the angel, and below on the ground floor of the barn the goats bleat sleepily, shuffling about before calming again.

“Hello,” Charles says, his breath a warm gust against the side of Erik’s face.

“Mmm,” Erik says, still half-asleep, and presses forward to kiss him, misses his mouth and catches the corner of his smile first, corrects himself and does it properly the second time. Charles’ lips are soft and unchapped, unlike Erik’s, which catch roughly on them like callused fingers, though Charles doesn’t complain, shifts closer instead, until they’re aligned all along their bodies, the unnatural heat of him delicious in the slight chill of the barn.

They kiss for the longest time, lazy and unhurried, Erik fighting against drowsiness to stay awake, but his eyes keep closing, and though there’s nothing to see in the pitch black he wants them open, doesn’t want to miss anything. Charles’ fingers are clenched in Erik’s shirt over his heart, palm pressing firmly against the flesh there as though he is keeping time with it, the beat pressing solidly against the heel of his hand.

“What have you been eating?” Charles asks eventually, when Erik has to breathe, stroking the hair back from Erik’s forehead, inspecting the rough growth of his stubble with curious attention, brushing back and forth against it. “You taste strange.”

“Human food.” Erik concentrates on Charles’ touch, presses down his own mixed feelings out of Charles’ easy reach so that he can examine them in private later. “I missed you.”

Charles kisses him again, brief and hard. “I missed you, too. It’s hard to get away right now, but I promise I am trying.”

“Why? What’s happening?” The hand on his face stills, and Erik feels his whole body pause, apprehensive, waiting for Charles’ answer. “Charles?”

“There’s a war coming,” Charles says, and sighs. “What with Schmidt… well, you may have stopped him, but we both know stories don’t end when the curtain falls. The humans don’t know what happened, and… oh, Erik, let’s not talk about that right now, alright?” And he kisses Erik again, forcefully, pushes on the meat of Erik’s shoulder and rolls him onto his back in the hay, releasing that warm, dry, summer smell in clouds around them as the floorboards creak and Charles climbs forward to straddle Erik’s hips, bear him down into the rough bed and scatter hay around them everywhere where it’s been caught in his feathers. “I love you,” Charles says with unusual fervour, and Erik forgets all about the pause when Charles rolls his hips against Erik’s, tugging away the blanket from where it’s tangled between them.

The weight of Charles on top of him presses Erik’s shoulders down into the boards, a sharp sting of pain from the rough and painful wounds that haven’t healed. He ignores it in favour of reaching for Charles, wraps his fingers around Charles’ hips and pushes up and against him, halfway to sitting so that he can press his mouth blindly to the line of that arched neck, tendons straining as Charles tosses his head back, rolls his hips again. The line of his cock is straining hard against his breeches, rubbing alongside Erik’s own and sending sparks shooting through his body. It feels - having a nervous system is so confusing, and he’s simultaneously floored and disconcerted by the sensation, trying to parse it into feelings he can understand. Charles’ thighs are spread to straddle Erik’s, his calves clamped down around him to hold him there while the angel pants and sighs, fingers tangling in Erik’s hair and holding his lips to the sweet spot just under and behind Charles’ ear where he’s always loved to be kissed.

It’s easier to focus on doing than on feeling, his body reacting in ways he has no control over. Erik clamps his teeth down around the skin he’s been lipping at and Charles cries out, drags himself away only to come back to kiss him on the mouth. Erik’s breathing is ragged, though Charles doesn’t seem winded at all as he reaches for the laces of Erik’s breeches, pulls them free and reaches in to take out Erik’s erection, dragging against the fabric to get at the stretched and straining length of it, stroke it with his hand until Erik can only shudder and moan with strange pleasure, simultaneously greater and much smaller than it used to be. He moves against Charles without conscious thought, reaches for him and fumbles at Charles’ own laces.

“Sssh,” Charles says, presses his free hand to Erik’s chest and pushes him down firmly onto his back with as little effort as it might take to move a feather, no sign of strain. He pins Erik there, and when Erik tries to push up against him Charles holds him there easily, his smile hidden in the dark along with everything else but the touch of his body. “Just let me.”

He lets go, and Erik stays put. There’s a motion felt in the air between them as he crawls down Erik’s body, a rocking feel of the hay shifting. When a warm wet mouth closes around his cock Erik has to bite down on his own hand to keep from shouting, cannot move his hips, pinned down again by Charles’ hands on his thighs keeping him where Charles wants him. The suction around his cock feels - it - he doesn’t know what to do, moans around his hand at the tight heat of it, Charles’ tongue stroking along the underside where the vein makes it sensitive, his throat dragging around the thick head of it, until Erik feels his whole alien body light up with it, his nervous system jangling with overstimulation until he comes, cock jerking in Charles’ mouth as the angel swallows, and swallows around him, prolonging the feeling until Erik is limp and lax with the aftermath.

Charles crawls up his body to kiss him, then, his mouth still wet with Erik’s come, curling over and around his body protectively, feathers falling around them to either side as Erik kisses him back, desperate and overcome.

There’s a feeling like a stutter inside of him, something coiling and uncoiling, and he cannot decide if it feels good or just frightening.

When he goes to roll Charles over onto his back the angel squawks, wings getting in the way, and they have to pause to adjust, the motion stuttering as they work out how to manage it. They eventually settle on their sides, Charles wriggling against Erik until he kisses that spot on his neck again, and then he is pliant and moaning, clutching at Erik as he moves down that familiar body until he can get to Charles’ laces and do a better job.

He doesn’t think about what Charles stopped himself from saying until long after Charles has left again, leaving the shape of himself behind where he lay, hollow in the hay.

 

 

  


**XII**  


 

Erik stays with Lucas and Anna for a month, working for his keep in nails and roasting spits, toasting forks and belt knives, working his way up from basic to more complex work as Lucas grows more confident in his skills. The longer he does the work, the louder the metal sings out, until he can feel it pull towards him as he passes, not enough to move but enough for him to sense, something he thought he had lost.

Nonetheless, there is not enough room for three smiths there, and Charles said to go north. Before long Erik’s feet are itchy with the need to move, to walk or run through empty spaces in lieu of flying, the next best thing to freedom. 

“If you’re looking for a place to set up on your own, I wouldna go north,” Lucas says, scratching at his beard with an odd expression on his face that Erik can’t interpret. “Not to say there ain’t plenty of work up that way, I know for a fact they need smiths, assuming you don’t mind getting conscripted. With all these rumours… well. If the army don’t get you, they’re very strange up there in the mountains. Border folk always are. You’d be better served going East, away from all the trouble. Head for the cities. Always somewhere you can set up in a city, man as good as you are.”

“What trouble?” Erik asks, straightening up under the weight of his pack. He’s two new hammers lashed to either side of it now, a gift from Lucas for the work he’d done. There’s a good heft to them, useful for all manner of things.

“Been hearing odd stories from up that way. Not much meat to them yet, though, and I’m not one to repeat gossip,” is all Lucas will say, though, and eventually he lets Erik go his own way, shaking his shaggy head at the pigheadedness of young men. “Come back down here if you find it doesn’t suit, I’ll point you in a better direction,” he says, and he slaps Erik on the shoulder to push him out the door. “Now go before I shut you in here for your own good.”

 

 

  


**XIII**  


 

He’s surprised at how lonely it is to be out on the road by himself again after so long in company, nobody to talk to and nothing to do but push onward, keep heading toward the horizon and scan the sky for wings.

Erik walks.

And walks and walks.

Charles doesn’t come.

 

 

  


**XIV**  


 

He spends one glorious night drunk off his head from the bottle of homebrew Lucas had stuffed in his pack, in the middle of a field shouting at the stars to give Charles back to him, for Charles to come, but he’s - strangely happy, at the same time, a curious kind of feeling bubbling up inside of him from the warm pit of his stomach where the alcohol has lined it, spreading through his veins.

Charles doesn’t come. Erik wakes up the next morning and wishes he was dead, throws up most of what he’d eaten the day before and tries not to move. It eases off by sundown, but there’s not much point in moving any further than he has to by then, so he moves along to the next field to sleep the last of it off and try to reclaim any dignity he has left to him, which isn’t much.

 

 

  


**XV**  


 

As he walks the mountains slowly, imperceptibly, grow bigger on the horizon, take up more of the sky and leave less blue behind.

 

 

  


**XVI**  


 

  


 

And then one day, he turns a corner and there she is, sat on a rock at the crossroads with her legs crossed and half-exposed from between the skirts of her velvet gown, leant forward with her elbow on one knee, chin on the heel of her hand and breasts near falling out of her bodice, and his sword laid across her lap like a pet.

_His sword._

“Hello, sugar,” Emardis says, blinking her long lashes slow and seductive, mouth a rosebud pout.

“What are you doing here,” Erik snaps, feet stuttering to a halt in the middle of the road and kicking up dust that settles on her bare feet only for an instant before burning up into nothingness and leaving her pristine once again, crisp and white. His eyes move from hers to his sword, back up again without lingering on her impressive cleavage; the metal is far more enticing to him, familiar and out of place. How on Earth has _Emardis_ got hold of it?

Out in the open air it feels surreal to be confronted with her sharp perfection, the courtier’s clothing and the comfort with which she reclines out of place in the cold winter, where anybody human would be shivering; her eyes are the same colour as the cloudless sky above, and when she breathes no warm mist escapes her lips, unlike Erik’s. All around them is farmland, wilderness, and here, in the centre, a spider.

Emma smirks and tilts her head coquettishly to one side, hair spilling over her shoulder in a glorious fall of fool’s gold. “Why, whatever can you mean, dearest Erik? Can’t a girl come to see her favourite angel as and when she pleases without being treated like an unwanted guest?”

Without his input Erik’s hands clench into fists at his sides, much good as it would do him. “If you were a girl, maybe.”

“Oh, tish. We were on the same side once you know,” she says, but the unholy aura that drips and clings like poison to her curvaceous body could not be more different from the bright joy that springs from Charles. The very fact he can look at her tells its own story, the thing that makes Charles blinding, luminous, utterly missing from Emma. Her wings are black as night, the feathers sleek and shiny looking until you look from the corner of your eye and see how greasy the slick sheen of them is, at contrast with her general healthy dishabille. “Why am I here, why am I here,” she mocks, pouting. “No ‘hello’ or ‘nice to see you.’ Or ‘that’s a lovely blade you have there, Emma, may I see it?’ The very image of discourtesy, Erik. No wonder they kicked you out.”

“Give me my sword and I’ll show you discourtesy,” Erik snarls, but both of them know there is absolutely nothing he could do against her, now. 

It’s every powerless, useless feeling he has had since he woke up human rolled into one, rooting his feet to the ground and trembling in his chest like a frightened bird huddling close to his heart, quaking. Fear is a horrendous emotion, one he would gladly do without.

“No finder’s fee? Say please.”

Across her lap the metal gleams, catching the light of the sky above them and reflecting it back blue, one long blade made of cloudless heaven, simple in its elegance. Erik’s hands twitch as though to reach for the grip of his sword, and he wants nothing more than to hold it again. It sings to him louder than any metal he has come across down here, recognises its maker. But instead Erik holds himself still and grits out, “I don’t deal with demons.”

A delicately feminine snort and another toss of that hair, streaming over her wings. “Who said anything about a deal? It’s yours, Erik. Elder Brother knows I can’t do anything with it.” And she curls her hands around the naked blade, lifting it from her lap and offering it to him with easy grace.

He only hesitates for a moment before reaching for it, four and a half feet of steel, as wide as his palm and etched with a long, deep fuller down the centre, a broad, heavy crossguard and two-handed grip. Erik takes it from her with his heart in his mouth, waiting for the trick, but it never comes - the sword lifts easily away from her hands, does not turn into a venomous beast or turn on him. Instead the touch of it zings through his body like an electric shock, something he had thought lost slotted into place, like a missing limb. He wants to croon to it, the gleam of it, beautiful beyond any of his other works. “Where did you find it?”

“Buried deep in the heart of a tree, split crown to root in half, with the blade itself standing proud from the ruin of it,” Emma says, already inspecting her nails as though they are far more interesting than Erik. “No wonder it chopped Schmidt’s head off so easily. I wonder that you didn’t just drop the thing on him and claim an accident.”

Erik sees red, breath harsh and gusting in and out, and before he knows it the hilt is in his hands, the point of it resting on the soft swell of her breast above her heart. “Don’t.”

“It’s a shame, really, if you’d only been smarter you wouldn’t be playing these silly games with that Charles of yours,” she continues blithely, not even bothering to move the blade away from her skin. A thin trickle of red blood oozes from where the point of it has pricked her open. “It’s all terribly tragic, never being able to look at him again. It amuses me, still, that God is so cruel as to leave you your Sight and your feelings - a kind God would have made you human, but Charles can’t hide what he is from you, can he? Not like he can the _real_ humans. Tell me, would you rather die immediately you see his true form or just go mad? Personally I would prefer you took the second route, far more amusing, especially when dearest Charles weeps over you.”

His teeth grind together in a horrible percussion inside his head, and Erik tenses to shove the blade home - a blade like this, there’s a chance it might hurt even Emma - but something in him tells him to pause, and he holds, eyes narrowing as he takes in the relaxed smirk on her face, and when he looks longer he can see the eagerness behind it, the shivering anticipation. “You’re trying to tempt me,” he says on a flash of insight, and swings the blade up and away from her flesh, scoring a light scratch along the smooth flesh that wells up with opalescent beads of blood.

Emma sighs, slumping elegantly back from what he can see now was the posture of a hunter, ready to leap; her finger comes up to run along the scratch, collecting the blood, which she sticks into her mouth, lips closing around the knuckle and sucking it off sulkily. “Oh, honey, if you only just worked that out you must have become more human than I thought. Their brain cells die off, you know. How many do you think you’ve lost so far?”

“Why would you - ” He stops himself mid sentence, feels his fists clenching, and he stabs the blade into the ground to stand on its own, out of hand and out of immediate temptation. “You’re trying to make me Fall further. You want me to be like you.”

“You must admit it would be a kindness,” she answers. “Your power would come back, of course, if not your Grace, and you would be able to look at your darling again. You wouldn’t have to grub along the earth like a worm, searching hither and yon for a hollow tree to curl up in for the night. You could stop all of this - ” she waves a hand up and down his body, as though she finds something distasteful, at last letting her sneer of disgust show through. “ - this filth. Elder Brother was very impressed with Schmidt, by the way. He’s a nasty one, and you sent him to the right place. He’ll fit right in, we have a corner reserved for nephilim. Believe me, he’ll get his just desserts.”

“I don’t care what Lucifer has to say,” Erik hisses, and takes up his sword again, holds out his free hand. “My scabbard, if you have it, Emardis.”

She rolls her eyes, rises to her feet in one long impossible slink of her body. “You can carry the damn thing. Next time, maybe, if you’re polite.” And as quick as that she is gone, between one blink and the next, a sweep of white and black and blue and a great wash of unclean space where she had been, leaving Erik alone on the road with a sword he cannot put down without dirtying.

He spends a lot of time over the next few days thinking about what she’d said despite himself, which of course was her intention. For all her harsh words about nephilim, he is, in essence, one of their number now, not quite human but not angel, either, half and half - though he started as one and became the other, instead of being born of both. Erik’s curse is that unlike the nephilim - spurned by Heaven and left to wander the Earth in ignorance, one foot in either world and unable to stand still in either - he has known what it was to belong.

 

 

**XVII**

 

He spends a lot of time thinking about the fact that she said there will be a next time, as well, and wonders whether or not he should tell Charles. Then again, he hasn’t seen Charles in weeks. The point may be moot.

 

 

**XVIII**

 

If so far Erik has been lucky in his human encounters, the village he walks through the next day disabuses him of any ideas he might have had about their general good nature. 

The place has been razed, doors splintered and blood-spattered, the thatch on several of the houses still burning slowly, dripping from the sagging fire-gutted roofs like molasses to spark and spit upon the sodden ground. The corpses of animals are still strewn around like so much rubbish, mindlessly slain and left to rot. The dead humans, at least, have been dragged away - there must be somebody still alive around here, though probably hiding from him if they have any sense. He’s rigged up a way to suspend the sword along the line of his back, behind the pack, so he doesn’t have to carry it in his hand all the while, but the blade bangs against his spine nonetheless, awkward and unstable.

He wanders between the houses, taking in the destruction with tight lips and clenched teeth, stepping over and around things he does not care to identify, notes the marks where somebody has made a half-hearted attempt at sweeping, the smell of burning flesh in the air - somewhere someone is burning the bodies. Nothing else to do with them when there’s this many and the ground is this hard. They’d never get them buried. Hopefully they took some of the attackers with them.

It’s a carnival of ludicrous destruction, most of it done for nothing more than enjoyment. There could be no benefit in this.

In the village square at the centre of the destruction the well has been spoiled, the carcass of a cow forced halfway down the shaft and, by the smell, running blood into the water. The stench is terrible - Erik has to pause finally to retch, only just avoiding throwing up by a force of will. His stomach, thankfully fairly empty, still tries to turn itself inside out across the stones, a taste of foul bile on the back of his tongue. His hands, braced against his thighs to keep him upright, are white-knuckled.

Eventually he forces himself to straighten, and the feeling of eyes on him only intensifies the longer he stands still, a sense of breath being held. “Is there anybody here?” he shouts, holding his hands out and open to show he is - mostly - unarmed. 

Nobody answers, though he shouts a few times more, and eventually he goes into the nearest house to look for any clean water that might have survived whatever happened here. Though he goes from house to house - those which aren’t on fire - the most he finds is a dead dog and some mouldering food left out to spoil, but no jugs or bowls or anything containing water, and no people.

Erik looks at the food and considers, briefly, the morality of taking some of what will almost certainly not be missed, but he cannot bring himself to steal, even from the dead. It’s hard to know what to do, because there is nothing he _can_ do to help these people - he has a sword, but there is nobody here to fight, and such a mess that he could never even begin to tidy it up, assuming there is even any point with nobody to live here. He wanders the battlefield the village has become and takes it in from the ground level in a way he never has before, as another vulnerable animal that can be killed, can be hurt like this, and feels painfully alive in a way that is terrifying, his body labouring at staying that way loud in the deathly silence.

The last house he goes into had been on fire but has burned out, leaving it open to the sky, empty of all but charcoal. The beams and walls of it are black and smoke-scented, crumbling at the brush of his sleeve, and everything inside is ash - the thick outer walls had kept the fire inside, turned it into a forge of its own, incinerating the house and its occupants. Erik feels an inexplicable sorrow at the few scraps that have escaped burning, one that bubbles up from his gut and clutches at his throat. If he didn’t know better he’d think there were ghosts in this empty shell of a house.

He turns, stepping around the remains of a table and chairs, and he’s about to go back out to the street when he hears an ominous creak from below his feet. 

“Shit - ”

He tries to jump away from the weak spot he’s put his weight onto, but it’s too late - he feels the charred floor below him give way, and there’s a terrible sense of panic that makes him shout out as he falls - 

Arms lock around his midriff and pull, hard, and Erik is lifted into the air and off his feet as the entire floor collapses into the cellar below, the ground receding as whoever has him flies straight up and away, through the gap-toothed roof. Erik yells as his ribs and arms creak from the tight grip but does not struggle, all too aware that if he is dropped he will splatter just as easily as anybody else. He is set down on the street with a jolt, staggering on knees that are still locked with strain, too surprised to relax into standing.

“Don’t turn around,” a voice says, but it isn’t Charles.

“Ororo,” he replies, his spine snapping to attention as she lets go of him, all too aware of who is behind him.

He knows the expression she will be wearing, can feel the electricity of her against his skin where she can’t hide her nature from him. She has always been a stormcloud, Ororo - one to play among the lightning and seed more where she can. It’s distinctive, now he’s not too surprised to notice. “I wasn’t supposed to help you, you know.” Her voice is wry, twisted with her usual dry humour. “I couldn’t just let you die, though. A ridiculous end. I couldn’t allow my teacher to be killed by falling into a pile of turnips.”

Erik looks at the collapsing house as the remaining walls tremble on the brink of following the floor, and it looks somehow smaller now, imploded and sad, with nothing left in it of life. “And yet you did nothing to help these people.”

“Not all of us are so righteous we think that we get to make the plans,” she says simply, and leans on his back with her arms over his shoulders for a minute, the way she had when she had been nothing but a fledgling, put into his care as a last attempt at finding someone stubborn enough to deal with her. “We are not privy to the bigger picture, even if we do see more than mortals do. To Him we’re much the same. That I learned from you, Teacher. A shame it seems to have been something you had to give away to give to me.”

Erik thinks of her as a child, of her playful good spirits and deep oceanic dignity, of her sprouting into this serious adult, trying to teach him something when it’s already too late. He reaches up and pats her hands, the rich cocoa of her skin a sharp contrast to his wintry pale. “When you’re my age, and have stood over the births and deaths of stars whose grandparents were yet to be born when you awoke to existence, then you can come back to me and tell me you can still stand back and watch.”

She snorts and lets go, steps back. “If you think I was happy to watch bandits slaughter this village without stepping in then perhaps you don’t know me as well as you thought. And yet, it was Father’s will, and I obeyed. Be more careful next time,” and she is gone, as quickly as that.

He looks around at the destroyed village all around him and feels as though he is standing at ground zero, the epicentre of this destruction, and a premonition rolls down his spine, a terrible, cold shiver he cannot suppress.

“Good luck,” he mutters for any humans that are still here, and walks on.

 

 

**XIX**

 

There are more patches of violence and the aftermath of violence after that, the closer he gets to the borderlands, where the towns are smaller or less well defended. Even in those so far untouched he earns more than a few sidelong looks and mutterings if he has the temerity to stop to buy food or a place to stop for the night; he earns a few coins doing some basic smithing wherever they’ll have him, more than one village happy to let him at an abandoned forge to shoe their horses and sharpen their ploughs in return for bed and board. He learns slowly that most of the smiths have gone or been conscripted by the army as they passed through towards the gathering war, only those canny enough to hide or lucky enough to be out of town at the time escaping the draft. 

The border is to the north, where he is headed. He can’t help but wonder as he sleeps in another room emptied of its sons if that is where Charles means him to go, and if so what possible reason Charles - pacifistic, violence-abhorring Charles - could have for dropping Erik into a war zone.

 

 

**XX**

 

He thinks of Charles sometimes while he’s trying to fall asleep, lies on his back and counts the stars above his head or, if he’s lucky, out the window, and wonders if Charles is thinking of him, if somebody found out he had been coming to see Erik, if he is in trouble. If he has already forgotten how quickly time moves for Erik now, and has become distracted by the growth of a sprout into an oak tree, perhaps, sitting enraptured watching as it gets taller and broader and branches out to the sky far above, if he will remember Erik has less time to live than that tree will take to reach the clouds.

 

 

**XXI**

 

It’s distressingly human how much his flesh-and-bone body yearns for Charles, though it has had only those two nights with him, those too-brief tastes of honey. It grows hard of its own accord if he thinks on it too much, and this too he learns to take care of, along with all of his other new functions and requirements. This, too, is messy, and leaves him having to clean up after himself. It seems to be the way of things, down here.

 

 

**XXII**

 

The way is mostly uphill finally after he has been walking for two months, noticeably steeper as he winds up into the hill country that fringes the mountains like lace on a gown. The trees grow hardier, broad leaves giving way to fine needles, the air a little colder still, though the season is edging into Spring. There is still ice at the edges of puddles in the mornings, the grass still crisp and crunching underfoot with frost. It melts by mid-morning, wisping away in the weak sunshine.

Where he had been toughened by long travel, he toughens further with the climbing, makes himself a man of string and sinew. He carves himself a tall walking stick from a fallen branch and smooths it out over long quiet evenings with the sharp edge of his knife, peeling away the rough parts to get to the softer wood inside. The end of it he caps with metal he scrounges from one of the towns he passes through, and if he has to sweat and grit his teeth and focus so hard his nose starts to bleed to bend the metal around the staff without tools - with only the power of his mind - it is worth it, to know that his gift is returning.

It clicks and clangs against the exposed rocks of the hillsides, and when he uses it to beat off a bear that thinks he might make a good meal it is sturdy enough that he does not have to draw his sword at all. He is starting to feel competent as a human being now, Erik thinks as he bends over and braces his arms on his thighs, panting from the exertion and laughing his defiance at the world, at the wildlife and at the sky that failed to kill him. His chest is heaving, blood pumping through him with a rush and a thrill that makes him feel energised and alive, all of his muscles trembling and ready for movement. It’s all hormones and chemicals, oxygen and adrenaline and thick-flowing victory that make him feel amazing, that make him almost want to throw himself down the rocky hillside to his death, flush with self-loathing and despair because he is beginning to forget what it felt like to be an angel, and going native instead.

“I am not human,” he yells to the empty firmament, hands curling into fists. Nobody answers, but then he didn’t expect them to.

 

 

**XXIII**

 

The road gets busier the further north Erik gets, though it seems like it should be the opposite; even as he gets further into the countryside ravaged by opportunists and burned to the ground, there are people in their wagons, walking or driving oxen or riding horses and donkeys along the hard-frozen highway and only occasionally lifting hats to one another, closed-mouthed and drawn-looking. Some of them are refugees, by the look of them, their earthly belongings piled into carts for them to drag along on wheels that catch in the ruts and wallows of the road.

Erik speaks to none of them any more than he has to, moves aside for those who are faster and goes around those travelling more slowly than he does on foot, gets wary glances for his broad shoulders and lean muscle, even hidden under layers of wool and leather - more for the unsheathed sword at his back. He gathers from overheard conversations that they are headed towards a big city at the top of the road. Charles never said when to stop, and Erik has been wandering on the assumption that Charles will let him know when he has reached his destination. Nonetheless, he avoids the humans as best he can, does not ask to join their fires and sets up his own a little ways off the road each night, curls up alone in a hollow of the hills and hopes for a visit that never comes, even with nobody there to see.

He smells the city before he sees it, smoke in the air like a thousand burning houses, but when he crests a rise and sees it swelling atop a craggy hill against the foothills of the nearing mountains it looks to Erik like a canker, a great cloud of ash above it from all the fireplaces and chimneys casting a pall on the surroundings.

“Ugly, isn’t it?” an old man asks as he passes, spits on the ground. “Too many people too close together for my mind, makes a body sick.” He lets out a loud, hacking cough, and keeps walking towards the city anyway, scratching at his balding head and bending under the weight of the pack over his skinny shoulders.

Erik watches him until he has to make way for a wagon to roll past, then starts forward again, downhill towards the belching maw of the city.

 

 

**XXIV**

 

Walking through the shantytown outside of the city is like moving through one of the outermost circles of Hell, full of cacophonous noise and stench and people and animals all vying for too little space and staring at the travellers as they move through it, hungry-eyed and sizing them up. Erik catches a few of them staring at him, but they quickly look away when they see his blade, ducking their heads to the side as though in submission. If they were dogs they would be baring their bellies for his teeth. Everything smells like the aftermath of fire here, like refuse and shit.

Surely Charles could not mean for Erik to stop here, for this to be his resting place, his punishment for his crime. He passes a group of soldiers stood clustered on a street corner and they turn to look at him too, appraising, but the sword seems to interest them, not scare them away. 

He does not reach for it, though he longs for the reassurance of its steel. Instead he keeps moving past, only allows himself to feel for its resonance against his back, thrumming quietly through his skin.

The city walls loom high over the buildings, cutting off the slopes of the hill the city is built on like a crown, high pale stone patrolled by yet more soldiers. On the far side the houses are in much better repair, their whitewash fresh and unpeeling, the woodwork free of the green wet lichen that clung to the shantytown outside the wall. The streets are cobbled and swept, and there are more soldiers still, everywhere he looks - striding about in their leather or metal armour, helms on their heads and short swords at their hips, one or two on horseback. 

He wanders for hours, down cobbled streets and earthen alleys, but all the smithys are closed, and no matter how many doors he knocks on in the hopes that the smith might be home, none of them are. In the end he is forced to pay for a room in an inn, and Erik manages with the last of his coin to pay for a bowl of stew and a mug of ale, which the barmaid is generous in refilling, winking at him as she tops it up and fails to charge him. He takes it to the corner by the smoking fireplace and nurses it, back braced against the warm brickwork and watching the humans come and go, a morass of different people - workmen and tradesmen and, later on, soldiers still in uniform, who gather around the bar at the far end of the room and laugh amongst themselves, shoving and smacking at one another with gauntleted hands and grabbing at the barmaid as she passes, her pretty mouth no longer smiling so genuinely.

A man slips into the seat across from Erik’s and gestures for another two mugs, two red fingers raised that the girl scurries over to serve and get away from the soldiers. Once she is done Erik feels his mouth purse into a scowl as he says, “Azazel.”

The red demon grins back at him with canines overlong for a human mouth, sharply pointed, and slurps at his ale just to be irritating. “Serikel.”

He must be working some sort of veil, because nobody in the inn reacts to Azazel’s scarlet skin or the rattling black claws that clatter against the rough pottery of the mug as he drinks. Instead their eyes pass over him as though he is just another patron, one that is not picking the pocket of the man sat behind him with the dextrous length of his tail. With his fingers he plucks a long sliver of wizened mutton from Erik’s bowl and drops it into his mouth with every sign of smacking enjoyment and not a moment’s guilt. “You look different today,” Azazel says eventually, raising one eyebrow, the one Erik had once bisected with the very tip of his sword and, at the same time, had nearly relieved the demon of his eye. “Did you change meatsuits?”

Erik tugs his bowl closer towards himself, picks up his spoon and glares at the hand that tries to creep in closer to his food, raps the back of it hard with the round of the spoon before taking a viciously overambitious mouthful.

“Hmm,” says Azazel, and he drops the purse he has been holding coiled in his tail into the pocket of the man beside the one he stole it from, deliberately tweaks the coat of the first and startles the man into clapping a hand to his side only to find his coin missing. “Emardis said you are grumpier now you are mortal, but I did not believe this possible. Now I see is true.”

The gesture Erik makes is not one an angel should know, and the demon laughs uproariously instead of being offended, rocking back and forth on the bench with eyes creased with mirth. The man behind him is bent under the table looking for his purse, swearing a blue streak as his friend helps him look. “I hear I have you to thank for this.” Azazel gestures vaguely at the room around them, at the soldiers at the bar who are once more harassing the staff. “For coming war. We downstairs are grateful, Erik, to have you for the heavy lifting. Makes my job fun and games.”

“What do you mean?” Erik snaps once he has swallowed the underchewed, overcooked meat. “This has nothing to do with me.”

“Everything to do with you.” A jagged-toothed grin splits Azazel’s craggy face, “Aha, you do not know. They are going to war because they think their neighbour country - whichever one it is, I do not much care - killed everyone in that city. You just killed Schmidt and thought that made an end to it, and now they will kill more people than Schmidt ever could! It is very funny,” and Azazel laughs so hard when he sees the look on Erik’s face that he nearly falls off the bench when the men behind him break into a fight, the second man swearing that he has nothing to do with the purse, the first one not listening in the least.

It’s as though someone has reached into Erik’s chest and scooped out everything inside of him, left his torso collapsing in on itself, deflated and withering inwards into a black hole, sucking away everything of him into despair. “That’s not true,” he says, but even as the words leave his mouth he hears the falsehood in them, sees in his mind the soldiers everywhere, the broken, barren countryside, the displaced people coming to the city for safety instead of staying in the homes their parents built, their parents’ parents, handed down to them, their family land.

“Good work, comrade,” Azazel says as the first man knifes the second, and grins slyly. “Let me know if you want to have some more fun, you know I will save some for you.” He vanishes in a puff of sulfurous black smoke that leaves the occupants of the inn choking and coughing, and swearing at the men fighting by the fireplace for knocking ash down the chimney and smothering everyone in a thick patina of conflagration.

 

 

**XXV**

 

Erik spends a restless evening in the tiny room he has rented a pallet in - it is to be shared with four other guests, but one by one they all escape Erik’s pacing and wordless snarls when they ask him to stop, none of them foolish enough to challenge him with anything stronger than words. The floor is wooden and cracked, splintered, and he ignores the way it catches and tears at his bare feet, leaving the boards blood-spotted and freed of some of their sharper edges, snapping off instead under his skin where they niggle and burn, fretting at the edges of his furious despair.

Though he wishes it as hard as he can, Charles does not come, neither to comfort nor to condemn - Charles knew, almost told him and didn’t, that last time they were together in the hayloft, had kissed Erik instead of telling him the damage he had wrought by doing what he had not been told to do - what was clearly the wrong thing to do. 

It had felt so righteous, ending Schmidt’s murderous reign and, surely, saving so many from his evil! Erik clenches his fists at his sides and slams his head against the window, shuddering the bubbled glass in its frame and making the dark night outside quiver and waver like a mirage, ready to be blown away at any moment by Erik’s well-intentioned foolishness.

He stands there for a long time, watches the last few patrons wend their breath-misted way home, down along the heavily-patrolled streets.

 

 

**XXVI**

 

When Erik finally does go to sleep, he wakes in the middle of the night sure that he heard Charles calling for him, lies staring at the ceiling trying to make his mind a beacon to call the angel to him through the pall that hangs over this city, obscuring him from sight, but the silence of the inn is never disrupted, and he falls back into uneasy slumber, twitching awake at each creak and groan of the building around him.

In the dark moments before dawn Erik stares at the ceiling and accepts that he has made a terrible mistake, and that there is nothing he can do about it but live with it. It feels simultaneously like giving up and like giving up a weight, something dragging him down and something lifting him up.

When he goes downstairs he finds his room has been paid for by a Mr. Azazel, who left his compliments, but Erik cannot bring himself to care what Azazel might have meant by that. Better to leave the madman alone to play with his armies - there’s nothing Erik can do about it now.

He leaves the city by the north gate, and ignores the guard who warns him about the shrieking beasts that live out in the wild country that way, can only think about getting out from under the terrible cloud of war waiting to fall. The road is paved only for the first few miles, and then, as it starts to wind up towards the foot of the first true mountain, becomes dirt and rock, untended but not unlovely. The very first buds of spring leaves are starting to open on the ends of winter-blackened branches, a fresh bright green among the grey.

Surely, he thinks, Charles can find him here.

He doesn’t, but Erik keeps climbing anyway.

 

 

**XXVII**

 

The mountain is steep and rocky, the path itself grassed over in places. Erik climbs with a strange sort of joy in the exertion, following the track of the land, and sleeps in the hollows of the earth, staring up at the stars. 

One night he awakes at the sound of a far-off screech, like the sound of some enormous owl; but it doesn’t happen again, and Erik eventually settles back down, slowly settling back to sleep.

He climbs for days, following the path, but finds nobody but birds. By the time he realises the long, narrow gully isn’t going to open up into a wider plateau - does not, in fact, seem to lead anywhere but up - he is desperately short on supplies, and he has very little choice but to keep going, climbing forward and trusting that Charles would not have sent him into a wilderness to die of starvation. Even with the walking staff the going is hard, the rock walls climbing high and smooth above his head and offering no chance of clambering out. When eventually he reaches a broader area it is an intense relief to spot one of the many thin mountain streams that snake across the land up here, crystal-clear and trickling down the far wall where it runs across the dipped ground toward the low point in the centre and pools. 

The flow itself is icy cold and fresh from the source. Erik bends to his knees beside it to scoop some up in his palms and drinks handful after handful with parched relief, half-drenching the thick growth of his beard, which has come in gingery and curling. It’s an insulation against the elements that he has chosen to keep even though it’s a nuisance, since there’s nobody else’s face to be concerned about kissing. He tries to keep it trimmed at least to keep from turning entirely into a mortal savage, so that humans can look at him without thinking he’s been living wild for months, barely civilised and ready to kill them at the drop of the hat. The colour of it when he sees his reflection is more alike to the far-northern vikings than to the short, dark-haired people who live in these parts. 

Prompted by the water, his belly rumbles, loudly enough that it echoes from the rocky walls, and Erik settles down beside the stream to check his bag in case there’s anything in there he’s missed, but it’s the same sad tally as the last time he looked - a few pieces of dried meat, a couple of withered apples. Walking back down the mountain to the city would take more days than he has food for, but going ahead is walking into a mystery.

The path ahead and the path behind look much the same, two identical pieces of string coming from either side of a bead. It’s a defensible spot, wide enough to house a couple dozen men and with approaches narrow enough to withstand even the most determined siege, flanked by steep sharp cliffs that give no room for attack from above. But he can’t stay here - it’s not dark enough yet to make it worth stopping, and Erik has long grown accustomed to walking when the sun is up and sleeping when it’s dark, to conserve as much heat as he can for the chill night hours.

And so instead he forces himself to his feet, taking up his staff again and shouldering his backpack to start uphill again, labouring against the burn in his muscles and the voice in his head telling him to turn back that he would only have heeded if it had sounded more like Charles and less like himself.

He climbs and climbs, and eventually, ahead of him there is only sky.

When he finally steps out from between the two rocky walls - which have grown taller and taller still since the passing place, slowly narrowing closer together until the blue above is almost blocked out by stone and bare trees, the passageway dark and foreboding enough that he almost turned back - the brightness of the sun is blinding, and Erik has to cover his eyes with his hand for a long minute, the red light through his lids too much, even, until his vision starts to adjust. When he lowers the hand he finds himself looking down upon a small village, a collection of unexpected houses curled in a hollow in the land that might once have been a mountain lakebed, like the curve of a palm, the way he had come perhaps an old stream or riverbed that had fed or drained the now dry bowl between hills. 

Strangely, despite all the bleakness of the world outside, in here the trees are all fully-fledged and green, leaves rustling in the breeze like a field, a swaying mass of fresh growth. Where he stands is higher ground, and it lets him see across the village to the reason the place is no longer underwater - at the far end where the ground rises again a ravine has opened up, and on the other side a wide river thunders down into the open crack, pouring suicidally over the edge and kicking up vast mists of rainbow-tinted spray that clouds the air all around, the roaring of it all echoing in the natural auditorium into a steady background hum like the sound of his own blood pumping. There are a couple of people moving around down in the village, and as he tries to decide whether to walk down there - there is little real choice, he is in dire need of food and if possible replacement boots, but he is stalling - one of them glances up and spies him there, and then both of them are turning and staring at him, their heads and bodies swivelling to face him like a pair of startled birds. 

He raises a hand in awkward acknowledgement - too late to turn back now, they’d only pursue if they thought him a scout - and starts to make his way down the worn hill path into the hollow, leaning back against the slope to keep from tripping and rolling down it all unwilling. He can hear their voices getting closer as they get up to come and meet him, buzzing and anxious, hitting a higher pitch when they notice the gleam of the unsheathed sword tucked between his spine and his pack.

“Hello,” the shorter of them calls, as the other one tries to hush him, shrugging off the taller one’s restraining hand and forging on ahead, brash and bold, hands propped aggressively on his hips. “Who are you?”

“Alex!” the other snaps, dragging him back by his shoulder and glaring at the lad, wordless communication in the looks they exchange that speak of long familiarity. That one is surprisingly dark-skinned, clearly not local, especially compared to the milk-pale colour of the first. “We don’t get many strangers around these parts,” he continues, to Erik this time, though Erik notes he does not apologise.

“No offence taken,” Erik says dryly - this is too normal this close to the border for him to take offence any longer. “I’m just a traveller, looking for a place to resupply and spend a night, perhaps two, then I’ll be moving on. I don’t mean any trouble.”

The pair of them eye him carefully, exchanging glances between themselves before turning a united front against the stranger. Erik hasn’t failed to notice that neither of them is unarmed - two daggers and one short sword - and both are muscled like they know hard work, like they know how to handle themselves. “That we can provide,” the taller one says, at which Alex squawks. 

The second man holds out a hand for Erik to shake. “I’m Armando. This is Alex.”

Alex scowls. “Armando is underexaggerating. Nobody passes through Cain’s Hollow. We’re pretty out of the way. Where are you headed?”

Erik shrugs, resettling his pack across his shoulders. “North.”

“North?”

“North.”

“What kind of destination is that? Just ‘north’?” Alex asks sharply, stepping forward again and puffing out his chest aggressively. “You following a star or something? You don’t look like one of the Magi.”

Erik shrugs again. “I can cut off some heads if it would make you more comfortable, but really I’d rather get something to eat and a fire to sit next to. Cleaning up the blood after is more work than I’m looking for today.”

Their eyes immediately flicker to the longsword lying against his back, and he can practically hear them trying to decide if he’s safe, wheels turning over whether it would be better to turn him away or if that would risk insulting him, if that would be worse. Eventually Armando jerks his head back in the direction of the houses, shrugging off whatever tension he was carrying and half-turning to lead on. “Come on. We’ll find you that fire and you can tell us some stories. I’m sure you have more than a few.”

“I’m not much of a storyteller,” Erik says dryly, but there’s a swell of relief, too, that he doesn’t let show on his face. He falls into step beside Armando as they judder back into motion. The two men whisper loudly to one another as they walk, not quite loudly enough for Erik to overhear; instead he looks ahead at the well-made wooden houses, carved shutters and windows flung open to the let the sunlight and fresh air in despite the chill, half of them scrubbed of the winter’s growth of moss and left raw and naked to the elements, some part-done and others yet to be touched. 

Pigs and chickens roam freely between the houses, grubbing at the dirt, scruffy, loud and squawking - probably communal then. There are abandoned tasks here and there - a bucket beside the well, clothes hung out to dry - but no people.

There aren’t many people here at all, actually, he realises when he looks closer - a lot of the houses are obviously disused, showing clear signs of neglect despite the attempts someone has made to keep them looking occupied. The animals look so untended as to be running wild, even, not so much domesticated as simply… here. He can’t hear anyone else, the place all but silent. Erik frowns, fingers tightening around his staff as he flicks his gaze from one to the next, growing increasingly uneasy. Something here is very wrong.

“We don’t have an inn, but you’re welcome to - ” Armando is saying as the door of the next house opens and a _thing_ steps out, man-shaped and absorbed in a book but nonetheless covered from head to foot in blue fur with the twin points of sharp white fangs caught on its lower lip.

Erik swears viciously in Enochian and reaches for his sword, already brandishing his staff at the nephilim even as his three escorts clap their hands over their ears to block out the crashing syllables - Enochian is not a language to listen to if it’s spoken by someone who knows its secrets - and the beastlike halfling drops its book to the ground, a flutter of pages crumpling on the dirt. “Oh dear,” it says, its voice a deep basso rumble like a lion. “Goodness gracious - I didn’t realise - I don’t mean to harm you - ”

“Back off Hank,” Alex snarls, and when Erik snatches a glance to his side the young man - little more than a boy - is glowing red-hot, loose rings of energy looping his body. _Another_ one - 

It’s a _nest_ of them _,_ Erik realises as Armando steps between Erik and - Hank? - with skin hardening to rock, not that it’ll help much against the kind of steel Erik’s sword is made of, and Erik snaps his swordhand sideways, the blade cutting through the cloth of his pack instead of wasting time on drawing it and tangling his weapon in the sackcloth. Muscle memory brings it swinging it around and into a guard position. A nest of them, and him here, mostly human and surrounded by nephilim with Father alone knows what powers - 

“Please put the sword away,” the blue one says, pawlike hands extended open towards Erik, though the thick claws on the end of each finger are hardly reassuring. “We can all talk about this - we don’t want to hurt you - ”

“You might not want to, but nephilim always do, sooner or later,” Erik replies, turning so he can keep Armando in his sights as well, the older one standing in a loose but ready posture, more worrying than Alex’s amateurish posturing.

“ _What_ did you call us?” the blue one says, astonished, as Alex steps forward and says, “Enough of this, let’s just get this over with,” and Erik adjusts his stance accordingly, ready to swing and intercept before the boy can let fly with his energy - 

“ **STOP,** ” and the voice is loud enough that it echoes from every side of the hollow in the land, reverberating like a struck bell, even the sound of great wings slicing the air and rolling like thunder above the sound of the waterfall, “ **ALL OF YOU STOP!** ” Erik only barely has time to clamp his eyes shut before Charles lands with a slam that makes the earth beneath their feet tremble and shake, striking the sword from Erik’s grip and grabbing his wrists to hold them still. His hands are still soft but utterly implacable, the caress of his thumb across Erik’s pulse devastating.

There is a pause, like the world is taking a breath.

Far off he can hear the nephilim swearing and panicking, but for this moment there is only Charles. He smells like the high air, like ozone and clouds. Erik’s head bows, sagging with the weight of relief, even as he has to lock his knees to keep from sinking to the ground and pressing his face to Charles’ belly in grateful supplication. “I thought - ”

“Never,” Charles says, his voice so full of feeling Erik feels like it must spill out of his eyes in floods, he must be sparking with it the way Erik feels, the way they once had done together. His body is close enough that Erik can feel the heat of him, inhuman and sun-warm, like the heart of a star. “Never, love.” Then Charles is turning to face the rest of them, grip loosening but not letting go. “I will make you stop if I have to, children, though I would prefer not.”

“You’re - ”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God,” the blue one, Hank, says, and then makes a sound Erik thinks might be a terrified giggle, muffled as though he’s clapped a paw to his mouth.

“I see you there, Alex Summers. Put that back where you got it from, if you please.” There’s a shift of feathers as Erik starts thinking about his fallen sword, just within the reach of his power, not quite too heavy to drag towards him. “Erik.”

“You know what they are, Charles,” he says, twisting his hands in Charles’ grip so he can take hold of Charles’ wrists in turn, gripping them tight even as his eyelids burn from the effort of clamping them so tightly shut. “You know - ”

“What are we?” Hank asks before Charles can answer, and his voice is sudden and desperate, closer, and it takes all Erik has not to look, then, and damn the risk, because the bigger risk is having that animal so close to them. “Please, what are we? Nobody has ever been able to tell us - ”

“Abominations,” Erik says at the same time as Charles says, “You’re our children.”


	2. Not alone for the blade was the bright steel made

 

 

 

**XXVIII**

 

“Not our personal children of course,” Charles continues blithely, though the people around them have fallen deathly silent, and Erik can feel the tension and disbelief colouring the air, even without Charles’ mental gifts. “But essentially.”

“We’re…” Hank’s voice is faint, disbelieving. “He said – nephilim. As in, _‘there were giants in the earth in those days_ ’?”

“’ _And also after that,’_ ” said Charles, “‘ _when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’_ Yes. Nephilim. Half-angels.”

There is a riot of voices around them, people shouting and talking and arguing all at once, far more than had been there when Erik last saw them. There’s fear there, too, they’re afraid of Charles, as well they might be - Erik tries to pull his hands free, but is stopped by the grip around his wrists tightening further, until it’s sure to leave a bruise. “Charles - ”

“Ssh.” Charles finally lets go of Erik’s hands so he can cup his palm to Erik’s bearded cheek, slides his fingers back into Erik’s hair and tangles them there, holding him steady. Erik stills, breath catching in his chest. He feels drugged, calmed, though every sinew of this meat body is calling for him to fight. Very quietly, his thumb rubbing against the grain of Erik’s new beard, gentle and strange, the angel whispers, “I miss your eyes.”

“I miss you,” Erik says, just as quietly, leans into the hand on his face.

There is a heavy step, one Erik attributes to the beast, Hank. “You - Erik, you - called us abominations. Why?”

Erik cannot bring himself to pull away from Charles’ hand, though he knows it must make him look weak, enthralled by this simple touch. “It’s not personal. You halfbreeds always end up with some kind of power, and either you can’t control it and it kills you, or you can control it and like it too much and end up massacring the countryside – ”

“But what if you taught them, Erik?” Charles interrupts, and brings his other hand up to the other side of Erik’s face; Erik tries to rear back and out of his grasp, his entire body reverberating with the word _no_ , heart pounding with a sudden need to fight or flee, but Charles holds him there, catches him and holds him there so easily, it’s as though Erik isn’t pulling at all _._ “Maybe they can’t control it because we never teach them to! Maybe if you showed them how - ”

“And how does he know?” Alex sounds as angry as before, if not more so; there is a gravel to his voice and, below it, a low warning hum, like metal heated too rapidly, like energy rising. “We’re not murderers! How dare he - ”

“Erik used to be an angel,” says Charles, sadly, and when Erik pulls away this time, he lets him go.

“He won’t even look at you,” a female voice says, with a tremor under false bravado. “Surely an angel can’t be scared of an angel.”

“If he looks at me he will die or go mad. He’s not - you might be half-angels, but Erik sees me for what I am. There’s no filter that can keep him from seeing my true self.”

“You should be scared,” Erik says, and turns his back on Charles, though it pains him to do it – not only turning away from him, but turning his back on these nephilim - and opens his eyes. The light stings for a moment and leaves his face wet, tearing against the sun.

There are five nephilim all told, four boys and a girl - too young to be called adults - all gawking at him and Charles with mingled terror and amazement, the whites showing all the way around their eyes, but still they stand there. Only five, but that’s enough. It’s brave of them, but dangerous to be in the middle of. He wishes more than ever that he had his sword in hand, but from the corner of his eye he can see that Charles has very delicately put his foot down on the blade. Subtle.

“He used to be an angel?” the girl asks, voice tremulous at first but firming as she stares back at Erik staring at her – she’s stood directly in front of him, blonde, white-skinned and curvaceous, and though she’s frowning now she looks as though she is more used to smiling, as though she has dimples, maybe. Somehow despite her physical similarity she could not be more different from Emma, dressed in a man’s shirt and breeches as though it’s the most natural thing in the world. “What do you mean used to be?” she repeats, folding her arms across her chest just under the curves of her breasts, chin rising stubbornly. Her eyes shift between blue and the same golden lion colour as Hank’s, unsteady and eerie, like a flickering flame.

Erik scowls right back, and tugs hard on his sword with his mind, jerking Charles’ foot off the ground for a moment before he shoves it back down, pinning the blade again. “I’ve had enough of this. Charles, am I still going north?”

Charles takes his hand, curls a wing around Erik’s shoulder almost diffidently. “No.”

“Where, then?”

The wing shrugs. “Nowhere.”

“What do you - ” and Erik stops, the truth dawning on him with a horrible certainty that drops the bottom out of his stomach. Surely not. “You meant for me to come here all along, didn’t you.”

The other wing comes around him as well, and Charles leans against Erik’s back, his forehead coming to rest on the nape of Erik’s neck, arms around his waist and - incidentally - pinning his arms to his sides. “You won’t want to hear this, but you’re… Erik, you’re essentially one of the nephilim now.”

Even the idea is like a kick to the gut. “I am _nothing_ like Schmidt!”

“That’s not what I said.” Erik tries to struggle loose, but Charles won’t let go, just keeps talking to him, like he’s trying to calm a spooked horse instead of trying to persuade Erik to teach baby murderers to be more effective. “They need a teacher, if only to avoid becoming what you say they will. And we both know Heaven has chosen to ignore them, as though sweeping our own dirty laundry under the rug makes it any better. Please, Erik. You need something to do, something worthwhile, and you need people around you or you’ll go mad anyway, whether you look at me or not. Let me help you. You could do good here.”

Erik snarls, leans forward and away, half-bent over Charles’ arms as though that will help him get loose if Charles doesn’t want to let go. “You do it, if you’re so set on teaching penguins to fly.”

“They have wings, don’t they?”

“Maybe we don’t want or need him, angel,” the girl says, glaring at Erik before leaning to the side to look over his shoulder at Charles, her gaze softer for him, more awed than angry. For a moment there is a strange blue tint to her skin, like a cloud has passed over the sun. “Though thank you for the thought.”

“Raven,” says Charles gently, his breath warm against the back of Erik’s ear, “wouldn’t you like to be able to look the same every day instead of spending hours in front of the mirror worrying, making sure everything is as it should be? Not that you’re not beautiful when you’re being yourself.”

And in front of Erik’s eyes the girl ripples and turns blue all over, the same royal sapphire colour as Hank, but scaled instead of furred. Her hair is scorching red, reminds him of Ororo’s friend Jean, and of course it’s entirely possible, he realises, that they’re related, that it might be down to more than chance. Her eyes are as golden as Hank’s too, shining challenging and a little vulnerable in her inhuman face. She is beautiful, indeed, and dangerous. Letting her loose in a human city would be like a predator releasing among a flock of sheep.

“Lovely,” Charles says, and Erik can hear the smile in his voice, feel the working of Charles’ jaw against Erik’s shoulder where he’s hooked his chin over the muscle there, stretched to read over him. “Erik, don’t you see?”

“And what if I’d taught Schmidt how to be more effective?” Erik steps forward and away, and Charles lets him go, though it feels like purposefully wrenching off his own limb. Raven is tilting her head to one side, clearly trying to puzzle out the story behind what he’s saying, not that it will matter if she does. “It was hard enough stopping him as it was, you know that.”

“If,” Charles says, and steps forward again so he is once more flush against Erik’s back, takes hold of him again, this time so gently that Erik knows he can break away once more if he chooses - Charles is the master of taking away choices by giving them - “if one of these is another Schmidt, wouldn’t you rather find out before they teach themselves and take them out now? Before they decimate a city?”

“Am I really your choice for a teacher?” Erik can hear himself weakening, and knows Charles can, too, by the way his hands curve against Erik’s belly. “You couldn’t find someone else? Someone more suited?”

Charles sighs, shakes his head, his soft hair and the fabric of his hood brushing against Erik’s neck and ear. “Erik, there is nobody else but demons. I can barely break away from Heaven long enough to come see you, let alone abandon my remit long enough to teach these children. I would be struck down far more harshly than you were if I was to teach nephilim instead of killing them. At least you had righteous intent, even if you were disobeying orders.”

It’s like a kick in the teeth, the reminder. Erik imagines Charles must look tired, the energy required to get loose of the magnetic pull of the Throne leaving him drained and exhausted. No wonder he leans against Erik so, Erik is probably most of what’s holding him up.

The memory of that pull is bittersweet, because while there is a greater freedom in being human and not subject to that intense gravity, there was a purpose and a belonging to it that his flesh body lacks, left rudderless and floating in a vast ocean without compass or sextant.

Charles is too clever not to know this, and it is only because Erik also knows how Charles feels for him - has had it demonstrated over and over again for time without end, has kissed those lips so many times he couldn’t count them and yet always wants to do it again - that he lets his head bow forward, breathing out with more frustration than submission, and says, “A compromise, then. I’ll stay here and watch them. But I won’t teach them.”

“Who says we’ll let you live here, asshole?” Alex snarls from behind them, and Charles says, “I do.”

There is silence for a long minute, only the sound of the far-off waterfall rumbling along in the background.

“I’ll show you the empty houses,” Hank says quietly, his voice as rumbling as the waterfall, “if you promise not to kill me.”

“No sudden moves,” Erik says, and bends to pick up his fallen pack. His sword he leaves where it is, under Charles’ foot, because one humiliating failure at retrieving it is enough for today.

 

 

**XXIX**

 

Charles, because he has a terrible sense of humour, leaves it stuck halfway into the stone mounting block in the middle of town. Erik does not find this out until much later.

 

 

**XXX**

 

The house Hank takes Erik to is on the outermost edge of town, closest to the ravine and the waterfall and furthest from where the five of them obviously live. It’s not subtle, but then, Erik can hardly blame him - every time Erik so much as looks at Hank the nephilim shuffles a little before stiffening with self-imposed courage, the fur all over his body puffing out like that of an angered cat trying to make itself look bigger. There’s no doubt in Erik’s mind that Hank could tear him limb from limb, should he choose, but the lad doesn’t seem to know it himself. It’s best kept that way.

The feeling of Charles following behind is a sweet torment, like having the sun at his back when his face is cold and being unable to turn.

“We try to keep them all in good repair, but there’s only so much we can do,” Hank says as he swings the door open with one dinner-plate paw, letting the sunlight into the dim interior of the boarded-up house.

There is a certain feeling of damp in the air from being so near to the river, and it’s close, musty-smelling and in need of a good airing. But the walls seem sound, even if what little furniture remains has more or less collapsed, rickety and damp-spotted. 

“It’s fine.” Erik steps over the lintel to get a better look. The front room is both kitchen area and a sitting area, laid out around the wide fireplace, with a door at the back that probably leads to a sleeping room of some sort. The floor around the fireplace is dirtier than the rest of it, probably from whatever weather has come down the chimney and rotted at the floorboards, trying to reach the soil underneath. “This puts me out of the immediate kill zone if one of you turns, anyway.”

“That’s not a very positive attitude,” Charles says from behind him, and Erik’s shadow in the rectangle of light coming in through the doorway is eclipsed by the silhouette of wings, blocking out the sun.

Erik snorts and lets his pack drop to the floor. He’ll have to repair it later, it’s fit for nothing at the moment with its strap slashed. “It is a practical one, though.”

“What do you do?” Hank asks as Erik moves to the nearest window to unlatch the shutters; they creak ominously as he throws them open, but the hinges turn, only a little rusted, letting more light inside to illuminate the floating dust in the air, the grubby state of the interior. “I mean, um - ”

“My power?” The next set of shutters is more stubborn, and he has to ram them with his shoulder to force them outward - must be on the side of the prevailing wind, catching the most rain. “It doesn’t work like that for _real_ angels, halfling.”

Charles’ snort is amused, though as Erik turns to survey his new abode in the light he ducks back out of the doorway to stand out of sight, just around the corner of the threshold. “Technically correct, though we do tend toward primary strengths. Erik has a particular aptitude for controlling metal. I read thoughts.”

“Only when people are capable of thought,” Erik mutters under his breath, hands propped on his hips.

The house is intact, as he thought, but it’s dirty with neglect. It’s going to need a lot of cleaning and hard work to make livable for more than just a night, if he’s to be staying here. He realises with unpleasant chagrin that he has no idea how humans clean their houses to stop them from being dirty. He’s never spent time anywhere indoors down here that hasn’t had a woman taking care of the cleaning, and none of them have asked him to help, or done it when he was about. He’s going to have to ask somebody to show him.

For now, though, he moves through into the back room, where he finds a solid bedframe but no mattress, an old ewer and bowl for washing with, and a serviceable cupboard for his clothes and things which is more full of moths than cloth. These he shoos out the window once he’s forced these shutters open, though no doubt a few will remain to torment him while he sleeps. “No mattress,” he calls back through to the others, kicking at the bedframe, and is pleased when it does no more than thud against the wall, no sign of imminent collapse. “I can trade some smithing for one, if there’s one going spare.”

“You’re a smith?” the nephilim calls back, sounding surprised, and then, “Oh, metal. Well, um, actually we could do with a smith, really, though preferably not one who wants to kill us all - ”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Charles says, sounding amused. “He wouldn’t push anyone into the forge. Wrong sort of flames, I understand.”

“I’m more concerned about the red hot tools.”

“It’s hard to clean off the flesh once it’s burned on,” Erik says, coming back into the main room. “Do you have a forge in the village?”

“A small one. Look, um, if you’re going to teach us - ”

“I’m not.”

Hank makes a huffy noise, half a growl. His shadow in the doorway is ragged-edged from the fur, imposing in a way the lad himself is not. “Would you please stop interrupting - never mind. It’s just. People will be more inclined to help you if you don’t act like you want to kill us all.”

Erik sighs and comes to the door, lifting his hand to block out the right side of his vision as he steps out into the sunlight, only the slightest waver of white and grey feathers before he turns to face Hank, puts Charles once more at his back. “Look. Think what you want. I don’t want to kill you all unless you all want to kill me. But I have been alive a very long time, and I have seen a lot of your kind. I can’t just trust your word that you five are harmless little angel babies. Quite aside from the issue of control.”

“We teach ourselves, and we do alright,” Hank says, folding his arms across his chest and scowling at the ground, his spectacles threatening to fall off the end of his flattened nose. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t benefit from help, but we control ourselves. I’m still struggling to believe we’re really - really - ”

“Nephilim?”

“Half angels,” the lad finishes, looking over Erik’s shoulder at Charles, and isn’t that a kick in the gut, that this half-angel, this person who has no claim to Charles, who knows nothing of how brilliant and kind and good he is, who has no reason to appreciate how astonishingly beautiful Charles is, can look at him so casually, when Erik can never look at him again.

“Lucifer was an angel too, once,” Erik says, and carefully does not think about Emma where Charles might overhear. “Show me the forge and I’ll see what you have for me to work with.”

Charles shifts behind him, his shadow moving on the wall, closer to Erik, until they overlap. “I’ll stay here.”

Erik lets his eyes slide shut. “Will you still be here when I get back?”

A hand caresses the back of his neck where the hair has become shaggy and longer than he likes it, stroking it out of the way to reach the skin beneath. “Of course. Go. You need to be able to look around the forge without worrying where I am.”

It is hard to enjoy looking at the forge when Charles is so close, but Erik forces himself to give the place its due attention anyway, under Hank’s watchful eye. It’s small but in good shape, clearly better kept than the house they’ve put him in. There’s plenty of metal lying around, plainly abandoned by the last man to hold the position, and some basic tools, though it looks as though he’s going to have to make most of his own equipment piece by piece. He examines what tools he does have one by one, turning them over in his hands and searching for flaws, making sure they’re sound.

“You say the Devil was an angel, once,” Hank says eventually, when Erik is inspecting the smallest chisel, finding the point to be slightly uneven, in need of sharpening. “But you Fell, too, didn’t you?”

When Erik looks up at him, brows drawing together with a rising fury in his chest, the nephilim has already gone.

 

 

**XXXI**

 

It’s getting dark when he gets back to the house, but there is firelight flickering through the still-open shutters - Charles hasn’t learnt about insects the way Erik has - and he opens the door with his eyes closed cautiously, slipping inside and shutting it behind himself with a quiet click as the latch catches.

“Erik,” Charles says from across the room, breathless and aching, and Erik goes to him, trusting to the angel to keep him from tripping over any unseen obstacles. It’s Charles’ hands he feels first, catching his halfway across the room, and then his body, pressing up against Erik’s, and then his arms around Erik’s neck, dragging him down into a wet and desperate open-mouthed kiss, lips sliding together on a sob that he thinks was him but might have been Charles.

“I thought you’d never come back,” he says between kisses, his fingers catching in Charles’ feathers and smoothing them along the sleek line of one wing where it’s arched above Charles’ head, half-mantled. His other hand is on Charles’ trim waist, holding him in close and tight. “You were gone so long.”

“I’ll always come back.” Something cool and soft settles around Erik’s face, a knot cinching it in tight at the back of his head - his scarf, retrieved from his abandoned pack and put back into service as a blindfold. “I got - you know how time moves in Heaven, Erik. As much as you may dislike being mortal, there is a lot more freedom, too. Sometimes I can’t get away.”

“If you were a good little seraph you wouldn’t want to get away.” Erik strokes the join between Charles’ shoulder and his wing, where smooth skin becomes fluffy down before the true feathers start.

“I love you,” Charles says, and drags Erik’s head down for another kiss by main force, his superior strength bearing Erik down to within easy reach so he can make the most of it, his tongue stroking along Erik’s as though there is nowhere else in the universe he would rather be than here in this glorified shack with the human remains of his lover. When Erik’s knees buckle Charles simply folds gracefully with him to the rough wooden floorboards and pulls Erik down on top of him.

 

 

**XXXII**

 

They lie together by the fire later, Erik on his back with Charles draped across his body, head propped on Erik’s shoulder and wings carefully folded so that his feathers don’t trail into the flames. The heat beats against the left side of Erik’s body in waves as the wind blows down the chimney from outside, a low whistle in the nighttime dark, a blackout only enhanced by the scarf he still wears around his face.

“It’s so difficult, keeping track of time down here.” Charles’ fingers trace idle patterns across the skin of Erik’s broad chest, sigils and words of power and protection made meaningless by remaining unspoken. “I feel like I could blink and miss you. I miss you anyway, of course. But. It’s like trying to keep hold of an unravelling string. I keep pinching and pinching, trying to catch it, but it spins too fast to keep it from coming undone.”

“Think how I feel.” Erik says, his words vibrating through him and into Charles, into the earth below them, more breaths taken and lost and counted out of his allotment. “I _am_ the string. I used to be a tapestry.”

Charles shifts on top of him, restless, and then abruptly he sits up, his skin moving away from Erik and leaving him suddenly chilled before the heat of the fire rushes in to fill the space. He reaches out blindly and Charles laces their fingers together, knelt over Erik with wings spread over the both of them, feathers tickling against Erik’s bare skin. “We spend so much of our time together being maudlin,” Charles says, squeezing his grip tight around Erik’s hands - but not too tight. “I just want to be with you, when I can, without spending all of it lamenting the times we aren’t.”

Erik squeezes back, making a soft noise of agreement.

“I can’t be here all the time, but… I know you don’t like the idea, but I do think you could do a lot of good here, Erik, if you just let yourself try. These children are really no different from Ororo, and you loved her so much. You were so good with her.” When Erik makes to protest Charles simply lies down again, rests his head on Erik’s chest to disarm him and pulls Erik’s arms around his shoulders, lacing them around his wings so that he is held securely. “Just think about it, for me? You can hardly stomp about making threats at them all day and smacking things with a hammer.”

“That’s what I used to do all day, and you didn’t complain then.”

He jumps when something touches the cloth over his eyes, stroking along the line of his brow and down over his temple, cupping his face. “I suppose you did,” Charles murmurs, and Erik can hear the smile in his voice. “Perhaps you should look at this as an opportunity to grow, then.”

“I saw Ororo a while ago.” He can feel it then, too, when Charles twitches in surprise, his attention caught. “Well, not saw, obviously. At a village that had been attacked by bandits. She was watching over the humans that were left.”

“I suppose I should have expected her to track you down. You might as well be her parent.”

“She didn’t seem especially worried,” Erik says wryly. The fingers over his eyes have drifted down to his lips, tracing the line of his mouth where the corners have turned downward, thinking about his erstwhile pupil. “She seemed to think I brought it on myself.”

He can feel it when Charles’ mood changes, like a change in temperature, or a gust of feelings coming in from outside.

“Nobody else made that decision but you, Erik,” Charles says, stiffly, and his fingers pause, curling in on themselves and away from Erik’s face. “Father alone knows you never stopped to think of me. You just - made the choice and followed through, the way you always do, and damn the consequences. And now I have to spend the rest of eternity mourning you after watching you age and fade and die, and I will love you when you are young and beautiful, and when you are old and frail, and when you are buried underground being eaten up slowly by the earth, and I will be alone. Don’t try for sympathy from me.” Charles’ chest is heaving against Erik’s with harsh, shallow breaths until he pushes up and away, as though Charles even needs to breathe. “Don’t be upset with Ororo because she can’t forgive you for being too righteous to think of your own family.”

It feels as though Charles has taken a knife to him and stabbed Erik in the chest, and the worst of it is there is nothing he can say, because Charles is right, and he knows it, and Charles knows Erik knows it. “I thought we weren’t going to be maudlin,” he says instead, and cannot hold on tightly enough to keep Charles from pulling away with a sound of disgust, moving quickly out of Erik’s reach. He has a moment of intense panic in which his hands fly to his blindfold, because he has to be certain Charles has not left, has to know - 

“For Heaven’s sake, Erik, don’t take that off,” and there are hands over his, clamping the fabric tightly to his face and almost cutting off the air to his nose, they are holding him so firmly. “I’m still here, you idiot. Leave the scarf on unless you are dead set on being the stubbornest man alive and having my face kill you for spite.”

“Don’t leave,” Erik says, and Charles sighs, bending down to press his forehead to Erik’s. 

“Not tonight, then.”

 

 

**XXXIII**

 

Erik wakes up alone the next morning, stiff with cold where the fire has long since burned out overnight - Charles has not had to learn how to build it to last, either. The scarf is still in place over his eyes for a blindfold, but he doesn’t dare take it off.

“Charles?”

There is no answer, and he sits up slowly, listening intently to the silence. “Charles?”

He waits, but when nobody speaks he finally reaches up and pulls the fabric down and away from his face, closing his eyes against the unexpected brightness of the light in the dusty house. There is nobody else there, but Charles has left him another feather, the shaft caught in the crack between two floorboards so that the vane of it flutters in the breeze coming down the chimney.

Erik closes his eyes again for a long moment and runs it through his fingers, the soft plume rippling against his skin, before making himself get up and face the day.

When he goes outside he can hear people moving around already, though the hour is still early; instead of heading towards the centre of the village he goes in the opposite direction, towards the roar of the waterfall and the thick cloud of spray that permeates the air around it. When he walks into the mist it settles immediately on his face and clothes, weighing down the fabric and his hair until they cling to his skin, leaving them damp and cool.

The ravine is deep, the rocks that line its cliffs jagged and protruding from the fall of water and spilling it in uneven strands to either side where they break the smooth lines that tip over the top from the river on the other side. On this side of the gap in the earth there are trees hanging over the sides as though gaping into the abyss below, their leaves speckled with water from the sodden air.

Erik looks down into it and cannot see the bottom for the spray, contemplates the defensive capabilities of the ravine. It’s wide enough to keep anybody from simply leaping across from the other side, a natural break that will keep invaders from approaching the village from the rear without building a bridge. He paces along it, looking for the narrowest part, but there is no point where the earth is any closer than ten meters apart, and while that would have been no trouble for him to glide across before, it would be difficult to cross for humans even without the added trouble of the nephilim village on this side taking objection, which surely they would. He picks up a rock and tosses it over the edge, waits for a splash that never comes. Nobody will be climbing it, either, not without powers.

Hank might manage it, with those feet of his.

“Contemplating another fall, sugar?”

His heart leaps into his mouth and he spins on his heel, grabbing for his sword, but of course it’s not at his back - where did he last see it, Erik thinks with a sudden burst of self-recrimination - his hand closing on the empty air. Emma laughs, high and ringing bell-like in the fog. Her gauzy dress is plastered to every curve of her body, her hair and wings spangled with drops of water like diamonds; the hand half-covering her mouth is a calculated tease, drawing attention to the beestung pout of her lips. “Oh, Erik, you haven’t lost it again already, have you?” she asks, swaying steadily closer, and he very deliberately steps out of the path between her and the drop, not that it would stop her if she were truly determined to push him over.

“No,” he says, and brings his hand back down to clench at his side, fingernails digging into the roughening skin of his palm, skin that had been soft when first he fell and is now hard with use. “What do you want?”

“I see more time spent as a meatsack hasn’t improved your manners.” She sniffs pointedly, one eyebrow rising in her perfect face. “And that dear Charles still hasn’t lost his taste for decaying flesh. How ungenteel of him, he’s usually so feline in his fastidious little ways.”

“What. Do you want.” The words come out between gritted teeth, but he manages to hold back the demand for her not to speak of Charles - there is nothing he could do to stop her and they both know it, as surely as he knows she’d happily tip him over the cliff if she didn’t want something, just to see the shape he made when he splattered on the rocks below. 

Instead of answering Emma just flutters over to the edge and leans far, too far, over it, tilting her head to one side as she contemplates the falls, reaching out a hand as though she would touch the water if only it were closer. Anybody without wings for counterbalance would tip right over the edge if they leant that far, and Erik finds it unexpectedly difficult to watch. This body has all of its primitive reactions to danger pre-programmed, it seems. 

“Emma.”

“Mmm?”

“Is this just a passing visit?”

“Oh, of course not.” She straightens, smiling coyly at Erik with teeth that are a fraction too white to be friendly. “I came to see if you’d thought about our conversation.”

He has done little else. Erik snorts, folding his arms across his chest. “Did you bring me my scabbard?”

“If I did, would you come home with me?” Emma asks, prowling toward him and only stopping when he puts out a hand to hold her off, stepping into the curve of his palm and letting it press to her breast; when he tries to snatch it back she grabs his wrist and holds it there to the warm beat of her insidious heart, squeezes down until his bones creak painfully against one another when he keeps trying to pull away. “Oh, Erik, surely you don’t want to stay this weak forever. There was a time I could never have held you like this, and now look at you. We could do away with all of this nonsense in a heartbeat if you just say the word. It isn’t such a long Fall, after all.”

“Long enough,” he says, curling his fingers away from her flesh as best he can so it is only his knuckles that touch her skin, a frozen blow instead of a caress. “No, Emma. Not even for a thousand scabbards.”

Her expression shifts, recalculating her approach. “Not even for a sight of Charles?”

There is a taste of poisonous bile in his throat, but he chokes the words out anyway. “No. Not even for that.”

“Hmph. We’ll see how long you last, playing your little blindfold games,” she says, and lets go. He steps back away from her as soon as her fingers have loosened, and Emma smirks knowingly, stroking her own hand over the voluptuous flesh of her breast. “You know, some humans play at such things for arousal. Do you find yourself liking it, just a little, Erik?”

When he reaches out in his mind for the familiar metal of his sword it is too far away for him to bring it to his hand; it slips from his grasp time and again, like a live fish, always wriggling from his hold and taunting him with its nearness. The demon woman just smiles at him as though she knows exactly what he is doing and finds it amusing - she is a close relative of Charles’, so she probably knows full well, Erik thinks sourly. “Was there something else?”

Emma smiles, and when her lips part far enough he can just about see the very pointed tips of her canines - only slightly different from a human’s, but sharp, nonetheless. “Is that a yes?”

“No.”

A pout. “You’re no fun. I keep telling Elder Brother, but he’s determined to have you.”

Erik cannot suppress the full-body shudder that wrings from him, a feeling like oozing filth slicking down his spine at the very thought, as though saying their sibling’s affectionate nickname is enough to draw his direct attention. “I won’t go.”

“Will you not? Hmm. Not yet, anyway,” Emma says, her blink slow and reptilian in its deliberacy. “I think I’ll hold onto your scabbard a little longer, then. It gives me an excuse to come see you, sugar,” and before he can complain she has jumped backwards, down into the ravine. When he rushes to the edge to look for her she is nowhere to be seen, and he knows not to hope she might have been dashed open on the rocks.

Erik swears aloud in Enochian, and part of the cliffside crumbles away from his feet with a loud clatter and crash of rock on rock, landing in the water below with an almighty splash that sends water flying up into the air before him. He has to dodge back to avoid falling in himself, cursing again, but quieter this time, so that only one of the little trees gives up its grip this time, with much less furore about it.

“Jesus Christ,” another voice says from behind him, and Erik turns to glare at - it’s the blue girl, Raven, though right now she’s pink and blonde and she has her hands over her ears, nose wrinkled like she’s smelled something bad. “That sounded utterly filthy, talk about cursing. What did that tree ever do to you?”

“How long have you been there?” Erik snaps, and wishes he’d been more measured when she immediately perks up, clearly guessing that he’s hoping for an answer of ‘not long’. “Do you often go about spying on people?”

She crosses her arms to match his, mimicking his posture. “I do when they’ve got crazy eyes, carry a huge sword and hate everyone I care about.”

“I promised Charles not to hurt any of you without good reason.”

“I don’t see your angel friend about,” Raven says, cocking a hip and raising an eyebrow in perfect imitation of Emma. “Of course, you seem to have more than one angel friend,” and her body ripples, is blue for a moment between forms as she gets taller, exaggerates her curves into Emma’s Rubenesque figure, draped in clingy silk and sprouting great black wings from her shoulders - _how_ , Erik wonders for a moment, speechless in wonder - before Raven leans forward to display Emma’s impressive cleavage to its best advantage, pouting at him like a fish. “You’re a popular man with the upstairs crowd, Mystery Man.”

“Stop that.” Erik waves a hand at her appropriated body. “Emardis would have your guts for garters if she caught you wearing her face.”

“Not very heavenly of her,” but Raven ripples back to her usual appearance, the wings swallowed up in the flesh of her back as though they had never been, face rounding out to its softer shape, her clothes changing back to worn-in breeches and a man’s shirt. Erik realises she must be making her clothes from her own body, and that she is, in essence, naked. “Your Charles isn’t like that.”

“Charles and Emma are from very different places.”

“Different towns? Or… oh,” and her mouth falls open on the realisation. “She’s from the _other_ place. But she was so beautiful!”

“It’s hard to seduce someone to sin if you’re all over boils and hunchbacked,” Erik says, and starts walking, away along the edge of the ravine to follow the edges of the bowl of land the village sits in. He wants to get an idea of the perimeter of the place if he’s staying here, in case he has to leave in a hurry or defend it from outside influences. That’s all he needs, idiot humans trying to invade and letting the nephilim get the taste for blood.

He hears her footsteps slapping on the ground after him - barefoot, of course, does nobody here wear shoes? - and he keeps walking even when Raven draws up to walk alongside him, keeping his pace easily. “What were you doing talking to a demon?”

An irritated glance sideways shows him a stubbornly curious expression on her face, that only deepens when he meets her eyes. “Trying not to,” he says gruffly, turning his gaze back to the rocky wall of the valley’s edge. It’s sheer, dotted with moss, but when he tugs on a low-lying patch it comes out of the shifting soil easily, not suitable for handholds, which is a mixed blessing. It means he cannot use it, but neither can anyone else.

“Not trying very hard, by the way you were groping her tits.”

“You - I wasn’t - why should I explain myself to you,” Erik says, stopping in his tracks to glare more wholeheartedly at the girl, who does not so much as rock back on her heels. “What do you want with me?”

Raven shrugs, scratching at her calf with the toe of her other foot, utterly unconcerned. “Maybe I just like talking to new people. We don’t see them very often, especially massively creepy ones. The most we usually get is a couple of days in the city three times a year when we go down to trade, and then there are too many people. It’s exhausting. So you’re interesting.”

“Father forbid I be interesting,” Erik says, and it’s half a prayer. “Go away. I have no interest in conversation.”

“Stop talking back, then. That’s what makes it a conversation.”

Walking away does nothing to deter her, and she simply follows, bright eyes mocking when he turns to glare at her from time to time, raising her eyebrows when he goes to tell her to go away so that he cannot say anything without being aware he would be the one continuing the conversation. He hopes she might get bored after a time, but she trails him all the way around the perimeter, a good hour’s walk at a fast pace, her own gaze following his as though she’s trying to work out what he’s looking for.

They come back around to the waterfall and she turns to him expectantly, but says nothing.

Erik narrows his eyes at her, and she copies him, tilting her head to the same angle and even moulding her mouth after his, tight-pressed and frustrated. “You are infuriating,” he says at last, tiring of the game. “What do you want?”

“I win,” Raven says, and turns on her heel to walk back to the village. To return to the house they have given him he is reduced to following after her this time, and though it half-chokes him to do so he is not so stubborn as to stand and wait for her to be out of sight before he goes. She has only won if he accepts that there was something to win.

She would be a natural in Hell, he thinks, irritated. Mind-games are all the rage down there, calculation and backbiting and manipulations. Lucifer ought to watch his throne if that one ever turns up on his doorstep.

 

 

**XXXIV**

 

Erik asks Armando - reasonably politely - for a broom. It earns him an odd look, but he gets the broom, and somehow acquires an escort home, Armando carrying another broom and three brushes of differing types with him. They then acquire Alex on the way through, who scowls and grumbles but follows along with a large sack of - something heavy, watching Erik with pointed attention.

“Aren’t you worried I’ll cut your heads off?” Erik asks, remembering suddenly that he still has no idea where his sword is. He’ll have to find it later wherever the damn nephilim have stowed it thinking to keep it from him, not knowing he could sniff out that blade from miles off if he had the need.

“Not really.” Armando shrugs, gesturing for Erik to open the front door and whistling when he sees the state of the interior. “Well. There’s a bit of work to do here.”

Alex whistles when he looks over their shoulders, nudging Armando out of the way so that he can walk in and put the sack down on the floor with a loud thump. “I didn’t realise the older ones were getting this bad. We’ll have to put some time aside this summer for repairs.”

With the full morning’s light streaming in through the open windows the dirt and disrepair is starkly obvious, everything covered in a thick layer of grime and neglect save for the area in front of the fire where the dirt has been smeared around by Erik’s and Charles’ bodies. Erik looks around with resignation, before turning his gaze to the broom. Surely even he can work out how to use a broom. “I’d best get started.”

“You sweep, I’ll start on the back room,” Armando says, picking up the second broom and swinging it in his hands like a pikestaff. He catches sight of Erik’s surprised expression and snorts, rolling his eyes. “Unless you don’t want the help?”

Erik is torn between being reluctantly grateful for the offer and not wanting these two to see him fumble at the task, a sick seesawing in his belly that is decided when Armando snorts again and walks off into the back room, leaving him alone with Alex.

“I’ll sweep out the fireplace,” Alex mutters, and takes one of the smaller brushes.

It takes a few experimental swings before Erik is sure of what he is supposed to do with the broom, carefully undertaken while Alex’s back is to him, and the first sweep stirs up clouds of dust that make him cough and splutter, bringing up a hand to cover his mouth. Once he’s worked it out, though - put the bristles to the ground and push the dust along with them - it’s simple enough, and he starts moving the dirt across the floor. The muck piles up quickly, until he is surrounded by a small ring-shaped hill of dirt on all sides.

Alex turns around then and sees him, and the twist of his mouth is enough to show his exasperation. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Have you never swept a floor before? Start furthest away from the door and drag it all towards the door, then put it outside where it belongs. It’s not difficult to understand.”

Erik just grunts and does as he’s told, trying not to acknowledge the heat rising in his face. The floorboards under the accumulated layers of dust are still dirty, if less so, once he’s finally moved all of the little piles out of the front door and back into the wild, Alex passing him by every so often with a pan full of old ashes and dead leaves and whatever else has fallen down the chimney that escaped Charles’ haphazard fire of the night before.

“We’re not bad people,” Armando says while Alex is on his third pass, leaning on his broom in the doorway of the back bedroom and glancing sidelong at Erik, who tries not to scowl at the nephilim’s breaking the silence. “We live out here together because people assume we’re demons, or changelings, or freaks. But we’re not. If anything we’re better than them. We don’t judge people for things they can’t help.”

Erik’s mouth tightens, uncomfortable and trying not to show it. “It’s not personal.”

“I haven’t yet decided whether or not you can help being an asshole,” Alex says.

There are so many things Erik could say, but they all stick on his tongue, clawing at one another over the wreckage of his twisted feelings since seeing Azazel in the city, tangled like briars and unable to escape. Instead he beats the broom harder against the floorboards, vicious and conflicted. “I have been alive long enough to know that a rabid bear will always turn on you. I have seen more nephilim in my long existence than you have lived days.”

“Well, wouldn’t they only send you to deal with the rabid ones?” Armando asks. “It would skew your perspective, I’d think. Have you ever had any - what’s the word, nelim? - children?”

Erik snarls, “Of course not.”

“Don’t be stupid, he likes men,” Alex says, raising his eyebrows. “We met his lover.”

“How old are you, really?” Armando asks, turning back to Erik. “You look about thirty, thirty-five maybe.”

“Old enough.”

“That’s descriptive.”

“Look,” and Erik leans his broom against the wall, crossing his arms across his chest. “I can’t explain to you what it is like to be of the _bene elohim_ one instant, and then crushed down and compressed and stuck into something a fraction of the size of a speck of dust, less than that, the next. I can’t explain to you how old I am in your terms, or how I know things, or how being encased in this flesh body is like being trapped inside a walking carcass that I am animating like some hideous puppeteer, always expecting to go back to the way I have always been and knowing I never will. You can’t understand the things I understand. Your brains are not big enough.”

“Big enough to understand you’re a stuck-up pretentious asshole,” Alex says. “We don’t have to help you, you know.”

“I didn’t ask you to!” He scowls, shoulders shifting instinctively under his shirt, trying to spread the wings he no longer has - it aches, burns, the scar tissue stretching and pulling with the severed muscles until Erik has to bite back a gasp of pain, teeth grinding. “I’m doing this for Charles.”

“Well, how would you like it if we assumed he was an asshole too, just because you are?” Alex’s expression is mulish. “Or if we assumed you were both filthy deviants for liking men the way we’re ‘supposed to’? Now, because we’re better people than you are, and because Armando gave me this look when I tried to tell him to leave you to get on with it, we’re going to show you how to scrub your damn floors, okay?”

Erik says nothing, furious and trying to contain the pain from his back, which has never really healed, and when Armando hands him a brush and they show him the sack full of sand which is apparently to abrade the dirt from the wood, he takes the damn thing and gets down on the floor to scrub.

 

 

**XXXV**

 

He finds his sword later when he’s already worn out from cleaning all day, having gone looking for it as a temporary stand-in for Charles. If he cannot have Charles he can at least have familiar metal near to hand, singing him to sleep.

Erik stands in the middle of town and stares at the damn thing where it’s pierced down deep into the rough stone mounting block, barely a hand’s width of blade stood above the surface, the long hilt gleaming in the light from the sunset like molten gold. He knows without trying that he will not be able to pull it out. The metal feels fixed, somehow, set so hard in place that without angelic strength - or full command of his power, which at present would at best manage to drag the thing slowly towards him through open space - any attempt would be futile at best and make him look stupid at worst. 

Father in Heaven, he could murder Charles right now. This is exactly his terrible sense of humour - taking away Erik’s only real weapon and putting it where he can see it but not have it, as a reminder of his promise not to harm the nephilim. He has such faith that Erik will not need it, strong enough to make that decision for the both of them, taking it out of Erik’s hands, but not strong enough to believe that Erik would refrain from using it, apparently.

It stings.

He goes to bed alone, without either sword or Charles, curled up in his bedroll by the fireside, having built this one himself so at least it will last. He can do that much for himself.

 

 

**XXXVI**

 

“What do you need most?”

Hank startles, hand jerking up from his papers so quickly when Erik speaks that half of them are swept onto the floor by the fur of his arm brushing against them; his eyes behind his spectacles are wide, the cat-slit pupils even more prominent when his lids flare back like that. “God! Don’t creep up on me,” he says sharply, before he can stop himself if the way he bites his lip right after is any indication. The man is a strange mix of strength and timidity, Erik thinks, watching him stoop to gather up his pages delicately between the very tips of his claws, careful not to tear the paper.

“Apologies,” Erik says, and does not step in from the open door of Hank’s house, stays firmly on the porch where he does not require an invitation. He can, at least, let the beast have his den unmolested. “I came to ask what you need most. I’d like to trade work for some goods, but there’s no point my making nails if what you need is hammers.”

“You don’t have to trade, you know,” Hank says, putting down his pen. “There’s plenty left over from the people who lived here before us.”

“Nonetheless.” What he can see of the interior of the house is tidy to the point of fault, everything in its place and carefully aligned with the edges of the furniture, none of the casual disarray that has so far cluttered all of the human homes he’s been in. The furniture seems blocky and awkwardly made at first until he realises it’s been built for somebody with higher-than-average strength, and likely greater weight.

All of the shutters are open, and it strikes him that Hank has no fear of discovery, of being seen. Until Erik spoke he had been perfectly comfortable at his desk, at home in his own skin.

Hank sits up again, papers gathered, and bangs them gently on the desktop to straighten them out before laying them back down. “I have no idea. You’d have to ask around if people need anything,” he says. “It’s not as though we have a communal list, and I’m not much of one for manual labour. Ask Alex.”

“Why not?”

The fur on Hank’s face moves - Erik assumes he’s frowning, but it’s hard to make out his eyebrows from the rest. “Why not what?”

“You have the strength for hands-on work. Don’t you get - frustrated, sometimes, if you don’t use it? Most of the physically gifted do,” Erik says, before he remembers that he hadn’t intended to offer advice. Too late to bite it back now.

“Maybe I like using my brain instead of thinking with my muscles.” Hank is giving him an odd look, like he’s not quite sure whether or not to be hostile. “Was there anything else?”

“I guess not,” Erik says, and steps away from the door before stepping back in, Hank turning sharply to look at him again when he had just gone back to his work. “Where will I find Alex?”

Hank shrugs. “Try the building next to the forge. He does his carpentry there.”

“Thank you.”

“…no problem,” Hank says, and this time he really does give Erik an odd look.

Hank’s house is in the middle of the village, so it isn’t far to go to the forge, but it does take him past his sword, and when he gets there he finds a skinny ginger boy stood on top of the mounting block with both hands wrapped around the hilt, trying manfully to pull the damn thing out. Hair that is a little too short to tie back but a little too long to stay out of the kid’s eyes flops forward, and he jerks his head to flick it out of the way; his fingers slip ominously closer to the blade, and Erik speeds up, half-running towards him. “Hey!” 

The boy jumps, letting go of the sword, and without the hilt to hold onto but still leaning his weight against the pull he promptly falls backwards off the stone, landing on his back on the ground with a loud “Oof!” as the air is driven out of him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Erik snaps, standing over the boy and glaring as that narrow chest rises and falls on a wheeze; pale skin, all over freckles, more of a stick insect than a human. Probably has yet to grow fully into his gangly limbs. 

“Hey, I heard the story,” the boy says when he has enough air, though his voice is still somewhat reedy, thin with breathlessness. “I pull it out, I’m the rightful king or some such, and I saw that angel put it there day before yesterday. That makes it legit, right? If it was an angel? Figure it can’t hurt, anyway.”

Erik folds his arms across his chest, nettled even though he knows it’s ridiculous - nephilim or no, there’s no chance this child could pull out the sword, and it’s not as though he can damage it by touching it. But. “Leave my sword alone.”

“It’s not yours unless you pull it out of there. That’s how it works.”

“It is mine. I made it, and then the angel thought it would be funny to put it in the rock,” Erik says impatiently. “So leave it alone.”

“Does that make you Merlin?”

“No.”

“Shame.” And the boy struggles to his feet, brushing dust from his tunic with long-fingered hands. He’s surprisingly tall once he’s standing, shaking out his shaggy hair and grinning at Erik as though he has no idea who he is. “I’m Sean.”

“Then leave my sword alone Sean,” Erik says, stepping past him toward the smithy. “I’ll know if you don’t.”

He can hear the boy scuffing his feet in the dirt behind him, but then there are footsteps following, which he grits his teeth and chooses to ignore - does nobody know when to give up in this place? The footsteps dog him all the way to the smithy, a sturdy, square wooden building with big wide doors at the front that can be opened to let in the air and out any smoke or steam or heat that might gather within while the smith is working. Inside it is clean and tidy if a little shabby, with an air of mild neglect nothing like the relative squalor of the house Hank had given him. Erik takes a look in on his way past, runs his metal sense over the few basic tools hung on the walls - two pairs of simple tongs, three differently-weighted hammers, and one solid vise that will suit well when he has to make the rest of the tools to supplement what is already here. 

Perhaps he should concentrate on that first, really, before undertaking any goods he can trade, but it really would be good to have a mattress instead of sleeping on the floor for once. He has learnt, since finding himself like this, that there are animal comforts he no longer scorns.

Sean is malingering somewhere behind him, peering in as Erik does into the dark interior of the smithy, so he moves on to the next building along; there’s not a lot of mischief the boy can get into with the forge unlit. The carpenter’s workshop is built along much the same lines as the smithy, squat and workmanlike, its front flung open and the entryway sprinkled liberally with woodshavings that have drifted out on the light breeze, pale little curls that drift lightly around his feet like snow. They match the colour of Alex’s short-cropped hair where he’s bent over what appears to be a upturned chair, doing something to one of its feet.

Erik frowns. Surely somebody with as fiery a mutation as Alex shouldn’t be working somewhere so flammable.

“Just a minute,” the man says without turning around, shaving off another bit off the leg of the chair before setting the thing aright and wobbling it back and forth with a hand on the back, testing its balance. It barely moves. “Better. Now what - ” he twists, and when he sees it’s Erik the casually friendly expression turns to a glower. Alex’s hand tightens around the file, and he turns all the way around, folding his arms across his bare chest. “Oh. It’s you. What do you want?”

There’s a scar on his chest that looks like a burn, a brand - an angry X-mark that is only slightly redder than the surrounding skin, instead the glossy white of scar tissue, raised and painful looking on Alex’s left pectoral. Erik looks at it a little too long, frowning, and Alex reaches for his shirt where it’s draped on a hook on the wall, tugging it on with quick, efficient movements and an unhappy twist of his mouth.

A quick glance around shows that Alex hasn’t got many more tools than the smithy does. Perhaps the last smith took them all with him when he left. “Hank suggested you would be the person to ask what needs making,” he says as carelessly as he can, does not mention the scar, stepping in to take a look at the metal saws on the wall - sloppily made and blunt, not good for much but brute force. “I might as well take over the forge, since it’s not being used.”

“I don’t like you.” Alex finally seems to notice the tool in his hand, setting it down on the bench beside him with a sharp clack. “You are an asshole, and I don’t like assholes, and I know from assholes, alright? But it has been pointed out to me that if I indulge in my dislike then I will just be ‘feeding your conviction that we are all savages’,” - he says this bit with a pointed sarcasm that makes it utterly clear he is quoting, “and so I am going to be utterly motherfucking polite, alright? I won’t burn your face off if you keep a civil tongue in your head, got it?”

“I will if you will,” Erik says with a wry sort of humour, and considers asking if ‘civil’ means something else around here, but decides against it in the end. Carpenters usually keep a lot of different glues around, and he has no wish to burn to death. He gestures around himself at the workshop. “You haven’t got many tools. Is there anything you need in particular? I’m looking to trade primarily for a mattress, though food is also a concern. And a new pair of shoes.”

“You don’t need to - ”

“I’ve got shoes,” Sean says brightly from where he has been malingering by the door, clearly waiting for his cue. “Reckon they’d fit you, more or less. Trade you them for a sword?”

Alex rolls his eyes and leans around Erik to glare at the other nephilim, jabbing a finger in his direction as though it might start sparking. “Go away, Sean! What in hell’s name do you want a sword for, you idiot?”

Sean is half a silhouette against the brighter light outside, but when he steps in his expression is serious, in counterpoint to the happy-go-lucky fool Erik has taken him for up until now. “You have to know there’s a war coming, Alex. Every time we go down to town it’s a little bit closer. I for one would like to have more than just my voice to count on in a fight. Swords don’t cut out on you at inconvenient moments.” He turns his gaze to Erik, smiles briefly. “I scream. It’s a thing.”

Erik takes a moment to wonder what that’s supposed to mean, and decides dwelling on it is probably more effort than it’s worth. “I’m not making you a sword.”

This earns him something halfway between a pout and an earnest frown. “Why not?”

“Because I’m not intending to teach you how to use it, and you’re as likely to chop off your own foot as give anyone else a haircut untrained. No swords.”

“I’d settle for a good dagger, then,” Sean says, and Erik shrugs.

“No. The metal you have isn’t good enough for solid weapons. It’s got too many impurities. Buckets, spades, hinges, belt knives, even, but no daggers or swords.”

“Surely you’re supposed to be anti-violence, if you’re an angel?” Alex asks from behind them, sarcastic as he picks up whatever he’s working on next - looks like a spindle, perhaps, or some kind of spinning top. “Peace and harmony? Singing?”

Erik snorts and says, “Do I look like I sing?”

“I guess not.” Alex pulls a narrow, wedge-shaped file from his belt and starts working a new groove into the block of wood in his hands, smooth and sure. “Fine. We’ll trade. I can get you the straw for a mattress if you can make me some nails. My best gouge snapped last winter, too, so a replacement for that would be good. But nails, mostly. If you can manage that without your heavenly powers, which I doubt. But you’ll need to get the sacking for it elsewhere, I don’t have any.”

Erik just nods - more damn nails, dull and never ceasing, but that’s most of the work of smithing down here - and leaves Alex to get on with his own project, thinking who to ask about sacking. He nearly trips over Sean on the way out, still lurking just outside. “No swords.”

“Fine, fine, no swords, no daggers, but I can get you the sacking and the shoes. I want a metal whistle.”

It takes a moment to register, but then Erik stops to give the kid a look, eyebrows rising. “A whistle.”

Sean shrugs, folding his arms behind his back and stopping, too, unbothered by Erik’s dubious tone. “I have trouble focusing where I want to put my voice sometimes. A whistle would be better than my hands, but I’ve tried wooden ones and they can’t take the strain. So yes. A whistle. It’s worth shoes and sackcloth to me, even if you think it’s stupid.”

He has to think about the tools he has - they’re basic, he might have to make something first to make the whistle, but nothing he can’t use for something else. “Fine,” Erik says, “done,” and then Sean grabs his hand before he can stop him, shaking it once vigorously to seal the deal. “Great. I’ll go get the shoes.”

“I haven’t made the whistle yet.”

The lad shrugs again, easy and unfeigned. “You’re good for it,” and he dashes off, surefooted among the houses and without looking back.

“Oh,” says Erik.

There’s a snort, and a clack of wood on wood. Alex steps up beside him to look after Sean, folding his arms across his chest in such a way that it covers his chest where Erik knows the mark is, even though the shirt hides it well enough. “What an idiot,” he says, but it’s fond, brotherly almost, as he rolls his eyes. “Look, you’re going to need wood for the forge to get it going and we need some more cutting. I’ll show you the axe, alright? But you can cut it yourself.”

“Thank you.”

It earns him a sidelong look before Alex steps forward out of the workshop, gesturing with one hand for Erik to follow. “Come on, this way.”

They go in the opposite direction to Sean, back towards the path, between some of the older and more dilapidated looking houses. Alex runs his hand over them as they pass, and in the careful, assessing touch Erik can almost hear him thinking about how best to repair them, about what he can do. It’s an odd preoccupation for a nephilim, especially one with such a destructive power - most of them are more concerned with tearing things down than with building them anew. Alex’s boots scuff up the wet green dirt and leave brown scuffmarks where it has been long undisturbed, five people not enough to wear this path down to hard earth.

“What happened to the people here before?” Erik asks when Alex turns towards the last house before the edge of the village and bends to reach under the porch, fishing around with one arm extended until he finds the handle of the axe and pulls it out and free.

“We didn’t kill them, if that’s what you think.” Alex stands up and swings the axe up onto his shoulder, resting the long smooth handle against the crook of his arm. “It was abandoned and falling down when we got here. We fixed it up. Nobody else wanted it.”

They walk towards the trees, and Erik glances at the blade where it gleams in the sunlight, reaches out for it with his power and feels the metal of it, tries to move it but fails. If Alex decides to take a swing at him out in the forest then there won’t be much Erik can do to stop him, save get out of the way. “How did you even find it?” The shade slides over them and leaves them green-tinted and cooler, in the space under the trees. “I only found it because Charles told me where to go.”

Alex stops abruptly, and in the moment before he turns Erik is already moving back out of the range of the axe, but the boy just scowls at him, brows drawing together to leave a furious wrinkle between them, his eyes hot. “Just ask about it, okay? You stared long enough that you’re gonna ask, so just ask and get it out of the way so I can tell you to fuck off.”

Oh. “I wasn’t,” Erik says, surprised into honesty. “I know about wounds, Alex. Enough to let you have yours without prodding at them while they’re still raw.”

Alex’s hands are still shaking at his sides, and there’s a slow, red glow rising around him, the turbulent heat of his power stirring his blond hair until it drifts around his face. There’s a feeling of strain about him, but far from receding his power seems to be amping up - Erik reaches towards him to try and shake him out of it but he can feel the scorch of it before he even connects. “Alex - ”

“What do you know about wounds!” Alex snaps, and his anger is only growing, feeding on itself. “What do you know?”

“Everything,” Erik says back just as sharply, and turns his back to pull up his shirt until it is caught at the back of his neck, under his arms but above his shoulderblades. He can hear it when Alex registers what he’s looking at; Alex inhales sharply as he takes in the ragged, swollen flesh where Erik’s wings once were, not infected but puffy and hot with pain and torn nerves and muscle. Both shoulderblades are closed now, but the amputations are raw nonetheless, no matter how long it’s been since he fell. “I know plenty about pain,” Erik says as the red hell-light of Alex’s power winks out, leaving him blinking away afterimages. He lets go of his shirt and it falls to cover the injuries once more, the thin fabric hiding away his shame.

When he turns around to face him Alex looks uncertain, like he’s been confronted with something he had known but not understood, and Erik reaches out to take the axe from him, peeling away Alex’s grip and resting the handle along his shoulder. It’s heavier than he expected, but welcome, the metal calling out to him like a dog begging to be petted.

“They branded me,” Alex says, and lifts his chin to meet Erik’s gaze. “In the city. I lost control, and they marked me up as a criminal, but I was just scared shitless of whatever - _this_ \- is, and none of you angels came to help, did you?” His breathing is heavy, laboured with anger. “So I escaped and I came to where nobody could think of me like that, until you got here. And I think you’re kidding yourself if you think they didn’t do the exact same thing to you.” Alex gestures at Erik, at Erik’s back, and while Erik stands and stares at him with a sinking kind of kinship he doesn’t want to feel, the nephilim jerks his head onward into the wood, jaw set and tight. “Come on, there’s a fallen tree just over here I’ve been using.”

They cut wood together in silence, Alex watching and occasionally offering a practical comment, until he eventually goes to fetch a handcart to carry it back.

 

 

**XXXVII**

 

“We eat together in the evenings,” Sean says later, when he brings Erik his boots, smiling cheerily. “You could join us, if you’d like?”

“No, thank you,” Erik says, ignoring the way the boy’s face falls, and goes back inside.

 

 

**XXXVIII**

 

He knows it’s not Charles’ voice in his head when he lays down later, saying that whatever else they may be, this is a village of damaged children. But Erik would like it to be, because then it would be an opinion he could consider and discard, instead of something rising from his gut and making him feel - 

No. No matter the mirror-image of himself that Alex has presented, Erik cannot feel sympathy for these children, cannot get attached to them. He thinks about Emma’s offer, and that he does dismiss, rolling over and turning his face into the pillow as though that will hide him from it. Lying there, Erik makes up his mind a dozen times to tell Charles about Emma the next time he sees him, and unmakes it a dozen more, flicking back and forth between yes and no, right and wrong, unable to decide which is which.

If he tells Charles, Charles will make him promise not to take her up on her offer - and he doesn’t mean to, he doesn’t, except that in the darkest watches of the night he lies awake on his new straw mattress - courtesy of Sean and a begrudging Alex, on the promise of a bucket of nails - and remembers all of the ways in which he didn’t have to do this, wouldn’t have to do this, if he accepted that human is not something he can accept being, not forever. Not when he remembers what it felt like to be himself.

 

 

**XXXIX**

 

The metalworking helps. Erik spends his days hammering out iron into a variety of shapes - tongs first, flat and hollow-tipped, for handling hot metal; then hammers of different weights, punches for holes, some different vises to hold his work still while he beats it into submission. He trades Alex a new gouge for a block of wood the right height to set the anvil on - just high enough for his knuckles to brush the top of the anvil when his arm lies flat at his side, mid-thigh.

Sometimes he imagines the iron is Schmidt’s smug and grinning face as he hammers it out with raw force, each blow keeping tally of the mountain of bodies the nephilim had left behind him before Erik put a stop to it. It’s nowhere near as satisfying as decapitating him was.

The longer Charles is away, the more Erik starts to think about Emma’s offer. And then a spark will fly from the forge and strike his flesh somewhere he is not covered by the long leather apron, and he is reminded of the particular geography of Hell.

Once he has enough delicate tools to shape it properly for a true note he makes Sean his whistle, beats the metal out thin and fine - iron is not ideal, but he has no tin, so it will have to do - and hands it to the boy the next time he comes to hang around the forge, picking things up and putting them down in the wrong places and asking questions without waiting for answers. At first Erik had chased him out, but after he came back the fourth or fifth time he gave it up for a bad job and simply gritted his teeth to endure it. Eventually Sean started learning where things went and putting them back after he played with them, which was an improvement.

He gives it to Sean the next time he comes in, strolling into the smithy while Erik works on Alex’s nails, and the lad practically tears Erik’s hand off when he snatches up the whistle, lifting it to his eye to look through it and turning it over and over in his fingers as though he’s expecting to find something other than a whistle. “This is great! Thank you!”

Then Sean lifts it to his mouth, and blows.

The whistle makes a piercing sound the likes of which Erik has never heard metal make, and the bucket of water beside the open door explodes, water spraying everywhere and spattering the ground, Erik and the forge alike. The flame sputters and spits and Erik curses, grabbing for the bellows and pumping them furiously to keep it from going out while Sean lets out a whoop of delight that makes Erik’s teeth rattle in his head. “Stop that,” he snaps, shooting a glare at Sean; his apron steams as the wet leather gets close to the flames, and it’ll probably scorch, damn the boy. “For Heaven’s sake, Sean.”

All the snarl earns him is a manic grin, Sean utterly ignoring what Erik is saying in favour of his own excitement. “Think what that could do to a man!”

What it could do to a man is all Erik is thinking about. “If you ever use that on a person, I will kill you myself,” Erik says, and that, finally, seems to penetrate the fog of stupidity.

“What?” Sean’s eyes are wide and startled. “You knew that’s what I wanted it for. Instead of the dagger.”

Erik puts down the bellows and fixes Sean with his gaze, hard and serious, trying to impress his point into the boy. “I did not, or I’d never have agreed to it - a dagger is bad enough, but it’s a weapon your enemy at least has a chance against. Once you start using your power to kill, there’s no going back. You’ll keep killing until you’re killed yourself. It’s the way of your kind.”

“Well that’s bullshit,” Sean says, and fold his arms across his chest. “I’ve been hunting with my voice since I was a kid, and I’ve stunned or killed loads of animals without turning into a bloodthirsty fiend. What a load of rubbish.”

“Animals and humans are not the same thing.”

“Not every human is the same, and not every neffy is the same!”

“Nephilim. It’s nephilim.”

“Not every _nephilim_ is the same,” Sean shouts, balling up his hands into fists, the tip of the whistle poking out of his right hand, still damp from his mouth. “I’m different from Hank and from Alex and from Armando and Raven, and none of us is a murderer, and you’re wrong, Erik. You’re not an angel any more so you don’t get to be sanctimonious, okay? And you can bet that if somebody tries to come here and hurt my friends that I’ll defend them, and if what I have is my voice and a whistle, then I am going to explode their heads, and I will sleep better knowing that I did it, but I’m not going to be hunting down other people’s heads to explode, and you can just shut up!”

The tools are rattling on the walls, and Erik thinks at first that it’s him - it had happened enough at home when he and Charles had fought - but then he realises it’s Sean shouting and shaking the walls of the building, the concussive force of his voice. Erik had thought it was his words that were making him feel unsteady on his feet, like a flurry of blows, but it’s Sean. 

“Go outside before you knock the whole place down on our heads!” he shouts back, and Sean shouts “NO!” loud enough that Erik nearly stumbles backwards into the lit fire of the forge, barely catching himself on the hot stone rim of it - he has to grab onto it with both hands to keep from falling in, but it burns his hands anyway, and he pushes himself away and off of it with a wordless yell, blowing on his hands to try and cool them, but Sean has broken the only bucket of water in the place already. 

“Water, Sean, before they blister,” he shouts, and the boy stares at him for a moment, gaping, before he sees Erik’s red palms and curses, dashing out of the building. Erik can only hope he’s run to the well and not rabbited on him entirely.

He lays his hands on the cool metal side of the anvil to draw out some of the heat and hisses at the pain of it, moving them almost immediately as the metal warms under his flesh. This is going to be nasty, he can tell already from the look of it.

“What was all that about?”

Erik looks up and groans, moving his hands again to a new part of the metal. “Go away, Raven. Not now.”

She steps in, looking at him kneeling on the floor with a bemused expression. She’s blonde today, though still dressed incongruously in masculine clothes. “Sean sounded really upset, and now I find you praying to your anvil. Did he catch you having inappropriate relations with your tools or something?”

His hands feel like they’re boiling under the skin, and he snarls, lip curling back from his teeth. “We had a disagreement and he helped me burn the surface off my palms. So unless you have something of incredible importance to impart, Raven, I am not in the mood for one of your conversations. Is Sean long gone or is he coming back with water?”

“I’m coming,” Sean shouts from outside and comes staggering back in with a full bucket, water sloshing over the sides and all over the floor, but Erik could care less; he lunges for the bucket before Sean has even set it on the ground and immerses his hands immediately, letting out a loud groan of pain as the cold sucks at the burns and numbs the pain for a moment, a falling away of sensation he is infinitely grateful for. They start to ache again after the first few seconds, but it is still so profound an improvement that he feels the tension drop out of his shoulders as he kneels there, soaking his hands.

When he looks up at the two of them Sean looks so hangdog that he looks like an entirely different person than his usual cheerful self, his wide mouth turned down at the corners and even his enthusiastic hair limp, sweat-sodden from his run. “I’m sorry,” he says, half-mumbles, drooping at the edges. Erik doesn’t miss the top of the whistle peeking out of his shirt pocket, even through the pain. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, you just made me so mad - ”

“That’s some feat, making Sean mad,” Raven says, eyebrows rising. “What did you do?”

“Would one of you go and find whoever handles medicine and get them to bring some burn ointment before we discuss the ins and outs of rhetoric?” The water is warming, and Erik grimaces, tries to find a colder pocket, fails. “I’d like to keep myself from blistering as much as possible, if you wouldn’t mind - ”

“I’llgetHank,” and Sean is back out the door again on wings powered by guilt, a streak of ginger lightning.

“No, seriously, what did you do because Sean thinks you’re awesome usually, not that I agree.” Raven kneels gracefully beside him on the stone floor and reaches for his wrist, ignores his glower and turns it so that his palm is facing up but still underneath the water. She sucks in air at the bright red colour of the skin across the pads of his hands, worst across the base of his knuckles where he must have caught the inner lip of the forge. “Oh, ouch.”

Erik tugs his wrist free of her grip. “Yes. Ouch.”

“I hate burns, they take so long to heal,” she says, and to his chagrin she seems to be settling in for the long haul, shifting her legs around until she’s sat cross-legged in her breeches, chin propped on one fist. “I slough layers and layers of scales whenever I get a burn, trying to grow it out, but I’m not very good at controlling it so sometimes my scales get out of line. Then I have to slough some more to try and get them to grow straight again. It must be easier with regular skin, you don’t have that problem.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Erik grits out, and takes his hands out of the lukewarm water to place them back against the side of the anvil. It’s not really cold, either, but the pressure seems to take the edge off. “Did you want something, Raven?”

“Not really. Other than to find out what kind of asshole you were being to Sean so I could tell you that if you don’t stop it they will find your body five miles down the river with a broken neck and assume you fell in,” she says sweetly, tilting her head coquettishly to one side and smiling at him.

Erik has to snort, shaking his head. “And you wonder why I think your kind are all murderers waiting to happen.”

“You wouldn’t expect a pack of wolves to stand by and ask a bear politely to stop killing and eating their packmate.” Raven stands, a fast, fluid, inhuman motion. “But they don’t go looking for fights either, unless they’re rabid. And not all wolves are rabid. So unless you hurt one of mine, I won’t hurt you. But if you do…” she trails off, shrugs. “Well, then we’ll see.”

“Then it seems we’re at an accord,” Erik says, and gets to his feet even though it means taking his hands away from the cold metal. “Because as long as you and yours don’t come after me, I have no intention of going after them, either.”

“Sounds fair,” she says, and he can’t tell if she’s just pretending to be casual or not, tipping back on her heels to look out the door. “Oh, here comes Hank now.”

Hank takes one look at Erik’s hands and makes a hissing noise under his breath that sounds more like a cat than a human being, and that’s that for smithing that week. Erik’s not to so much as grip a hammer until Hank says otherwise.

“And if I do?”

The blue-furred nephilim looks at him over the rims of his glasses, mouth a wry line. “If you want to hurt yourself more then be my guest, Erik. I’m not your mother. Just remember you only get one set of those as a mortal. There aren’t any spare parts down here.”

“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?” Erik asks, disgruntled and looking at his bandaged palms with resignation. “Also, your grasp of heavenly biology is seriously lacking.”

“You could teach me,” Sean says, and twitches when the other three turn to stare at him, Hank and Raven in disbelief, and Erik - Erik doesn’t know how he feels. “Not - not powers, I’m not stupid enough to think you’d say yes, but… smithing, maybe? I could be your apprentice or something.” He shuffles his feet in the dirt, ducks his head, ginger curls falling to hide his expression. “It was just an idea.”

“I can’t teach you smithing in a week,” Erik says, testing, and Sean says, “Duh.”

Erik looks at him for a minute, two, and the three nephilim just wait, for once silent and waiting for him to give his verdict. He looks at the lad and catalogues the wiry strength of his gangly body - he’ll grow into that soon enough - and thinks of how flighty Sean is, then of the way he keeps coming back and handling the tools, like perhaps he wants to get to know them. And eventually Erik sighs and says, “I reserve the right to change my mind.”

“Oh!” Sean’s head snaps up, and he breaks into a wide grin that seems to spread across half of his face, flushing with pleasure. “Thanks - you won’t regret it, I won’t give you a reason to change your mind, I swear!”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Erik says dryly. “Now go away. We’ll start tomorrow when I feel less like smacking you and undoing Hank’s hard work.”

“Tomorrow!” The lad is a fiery streak on his way out, and Hank and Raven are still giving Erik sidelong looks, though neither of them really has eyebrows to raise.

“You go away too,” Erik says, and looks at the mess of the smithy. Tidying it up without aggravating his hands is going to be difficult.

“I’ll do it,” Raven says, picking up his second-smallest hammer from where it’s fallen to the floor. “Just tell me where things go.”

 

 

**XL**

 

Except Erik wakes up draped in wings, cloth falling snug across his eyes. His hands have stopped hurting, smell like Charles’ ointment.

“Hello, love,” Charles whispers in the dead of night, and bends to kiss him.

 

 

**XLI**

 

Charles’ borrowed flesh is unnaturally warm against Erik’s as they move together, and Erik cannot help but remember that this is not what Charles is really made of, that this is not his breath even as they gasp and Charles inhales raggedly, face hidden in Erik’s neck.

He thinks about what Emma said - about decay and meat, and even when he’s coming he can’t help but clutch Charles tighter, as though it will stop him from being too ephemeral for Erik to hold onto, really hold, the fire of him and not just this glove puppet.

“What’s wrong?” Charles asks after, pressing kisses to the planes of Erik’s face, even those covered by the blindfold, and his lips are wet, and when he comes he produces seed - Erik’s chest is spattered with it - and Erik cannot decide how real is real enough.

“I just love you, is all,” he says, and pulls Charles’ mouth to meet his own.

 

 

**XLII**

 

“She’s wrong, you know,” Charles says even later, when they’re tangled up on the narrow mattress in the bedroom at the back of Erik’s house. He’s laying half on top of Erik, his wings splayed across him in lieu of blankets - the feathers are warm enough.

“Mmm?” Erik is half-asleep and languorous with skin-comfort, and it takes him a moment to process what Charles has said. “Who?”

He knows full well who.

Charles shifts above him, lifting himself onto his forearms and bracing them on Erik’s chest, elbows digging in a little to the softer space just below his ribs. “Emma, of course. Don’t play stupid, Erik, it doesn’t suit you.” 

“How - ”

“Oh, how do you think I knew. You don’t hide your thoughts from me, Erik, especially like this, and you were thinking very loudly about her visits.”

It’s enough to shake off the last of his drowsiness, and Erik sighs, because of course Charles would find out and want to lecture him about it in the middle of the night when Erik’s human body needs to sleep. It’s another one of those things he had to find out for himself - how to let himself fall into oblivion for hours at a time and trust that he will wake up again - and something Charles seems to see as a curiosity rather than a necessity. Erik gathers his hands under himself and pushes himself upright, dislodging Charles, who pulls away with a disgruntled ruffle of feathers that gusts air across Erik’s face. 

When he reaches for Charles’ hand, though, the angel offers it without hesitation, curling his fingers into Erik’s immediately and holding on.

“She’s not wrong,” Erik says, and feels Charles’ hand in his stiffen, clenching tighter as though Erik might leave him right this moment, make his decision and vanish if Charles doesn’t grip tightly enough. “She’s been remarkably straightforward for one of the Fallen, Charles, and I’d be a fool not to at least consider what she has to say.”

“You’d be a fool to consider it for a moment,” Charles snaps, and his other hand grasps Erik’s forearm, locking them together. “You didn’t fall as far as they did because you are _good_ , Erik, and they are bad, and that is all there is to it. Human is better than demon, and I’d rather have you for a brief human life than spend an eternity watching you shrivel up in the heat and the foetid evil of Hell and turn into somebody else. It wouldn’t be you who was left behind if you made that choice, and I won’t let you.”

“You couldn’t stop me.” Erik reaches out with his free hand to find Charles’ face, strokes his fingertips along that downy cheek, feels it when Charles’ expression crumples. “That’s why they call it a choice.”

Wetness, then, where his fingertips interrupt the downward roll of a tear. “Don’t. Don’t choose her.” Charles’ head bows, but he cups Erik’s hand to his cheek tightly. “No, Erik. Don’t do this.”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Decide not to. Renounce her, for me, and say no forever.”

“Don’t make me promise you something I can’t,” Erik says, and his voice breaks on the words. “Eventually either I die of old age or disease or accident or murder, or I reach the point at which I can no longer stand never to look at you again, and then I can either look and go mad or choose Emma’s path and look my fill before paying the price. There is no happy ending to this. I don’t have forever without her offer.”

“Either way I lose you. Let me be selfish this once and say I’d rather you were dead,” Charles says. The bed shifts, and his hands let go of Erik’s only long enough to wrap his arms around Erik’s shoulders and push him back down flat onto the bed, laying on top of him and pinning him there with a weight that feels suddenly heavy as mountains. The push of his chest against Erik’s as his breath shudders is tremulous and silent, only the faintest of gasps to give him away. “Go to sleep. I think you’re broken. You sleep a lot, don’t you? Maybe it will fix you and you’ll be sensible in the morning.”

“Will you be here in the morning?” Erik turns his face into Charles’ hair. It smells like the fresh wild air in the high reaches of the sky, like inclement weather.

And Charles’ hand clenches into a fist on Erik’s breast, over the beat of his human heart. “Oh, yes. Go to sleep.”

Erik does, for once, as he’s told.

 

 

**XLIII**

 

He wakes up with a numb arm, exhausted, but still trapped beneath the weight of an angel, who stubbornly does not move even when Erik tries to shove him off, just grumbles and holds on. He can’t have been sleeping, so Erik doesn’t know what Charles has to complain about.

“Unless you want to get up close and personal with more mortal indignities, let me up,” he says eventually, and when Charles only makes an enquiring noise as though that sounds interesting, adds, “You’re not watching me piss, Charles.”

“Hmm? Why not?”

Erik has to think about this one, because as much as he’s internalised these rules somewhat since he crashed to Earth, he still doesn’t really understand where they come from. “It’s taboo here. Also, pissing is disgusting.”

“Mmf. I don’t see why I should care,” Charles says, but he rolls off to the side long enough to let Erik get up.

Erik snorts and runs his hand down Charles’ side, the closest part he can reach. “Stay here. I don’t know the house well enough to get to the outhouse blindfolded.”

“Okay.”

Erik finds his pants on the floor with a little help from Charles, who drags them over to his seeking hands with the tip of a wing; then he steps out into the main room of the house and closes the door behind himself, to prevent accidents, and pulls off the blindfold.

It’s blindingly bright; he flings up a hand to cover his eyes again and only slowly lowers it, wincing and squinting against the light. The shutters are shut, but the cracks and pinholes of early morning sun that make their way through into the dim interior are more than bright enough after total darkness to make him hiss, blinking through the pain.

Everything in the house - what little there is in the house - is in its right place, tidy and austere. It feels as though things should be dramatically different with Charles here in the daylight in the room behind him, but they’re the same, the pans he’d made himself resting by the fireplace, the single chair and table he’d bartered from Alex. The feather Charles had left him the last time, laid on the mantelpiece above the fire, still pristinely white despite the errant smoke that gets past the lip of the mantel from time to time, staining the ceiling above it. Erik’s two pairs of boots are sat in a row by the door, and he shuffles his feet into the older, looser pair, before trudging outdoors to take care of business.

When he comes back out into the spring sunshine, scrubbing a hand over his face to wipe away the last remnants of sleep, Sean is standing on his doorstep, scruffy and alive with energy, hand extended ready to knock.

“Good morning,” Erik rumbles, and the lad leaps half a foot in the air, letting out a little screech of surprise that rattles the shutters on the house. Sean clutches at his chest dramatically, turning his embarrassment into a pratfall, and laughs, leaning against the wall. 

“Morning! Ready to go?”

“It’s barely gone dawn,” Erik says, and pushes past Sean to open his front door again, feeling suddenly very old and wanting nothing more than to crawl back into bed with Charles and curl up, breathing close and dear, speaking in tongues about things Erik has missed, these past months. He turns in the doorway before the boy can come in, bracing one arm on either side and looking down at him as neutrally as possible. “I know I said tomorrow, Sean, but I didn’t mean the moment the sun cleared the horizon. And - ”

“Something came up,” Charles says from behind Erik, and it is only after he speaks that Erik hears the sound of Charles moving, looking over Erik’s shoulder at Sean, who is staring gobsmacked at the angel, mouth wide enough to catch flies. “I’m terribly sorry, Sean, but I’m going to co-opt Erik for the day. Perhaps you can start your lessons tomorrow.”

It would be a lie to say the boy doesn’t look a little crestfallen at that, and Erik can’t help but feel guilty at how well Sean takes it, sliding his hands into his pockets and shrugging easily, a quirk of his mouth for an attempted smile that falls rather short of the mark, disappointment written on his face that Erik cannot help but be surprised by. He hadn’t thought Sean felt so strongly about smithing. The boy ducks his head, fiery hair falling forward to hide his expression. “No problem, uh, my Lord.” 

Charles laughs, gentle and warm. “Just call me Charles, Sean. No titles necessary.”

“You could - ” Sean hesitates, then fumbles out, “it would be an honour to have you share our dinner later, sir. Charles. It’s not much, but - ”

“I’d like that,” Charles says before Erik can say no, sounding genuinely interested, and Sean smiles before turning back to Erik, who gets more of a hangdog expression as the lad remembers he’s missing out on his lesson.

“Uh… later then, Erik.” He ambles off, most of the energy drained from him, enough that Erik almost calls out after him to tell him to wait.

“Come back inside,” Charles says into his ear, and Erik goes.

 

 

**XLIV**

 

The day passes too quickly, and try as he might, Erik cannot persuade Charles out of going to have dinner with the others.

“Why?” he asks eventually, and bends his head for Charles to check his blindfold is firmly in place. There is a small whuff of breath as Charles chuckles, fingers stroking the fabric down along the line of Erik’s cheek.

“Because you are a misanthropic, grumpy old man who would rather hide in the dark than eat with other people,” Charles says, and steps back, opening the door with a creak of the hinges. “And you’re going to be spending a lot of time here, so you should get to know them.”

Erik scowls behind the wool of his scarf, but Charles’ fingers close around his to guide him outside, a firm guiding grip, and they walk out into the cool night air, Erik ensuring to broadcast his resentment so that Charles can’t help but feel it. Under his feet the village is made strange and mysterious, threatening - until Charles tugs on his hand to pull him closer, walk side by side, shoulders brushing with each step. 

“Try to look neutral if you can’t smile.”

“You know me. Neutral is my default,” Erik says, and lets Charles nudge him with an elbow to the ribs, snorts even as he stumbles over the uneven ground.

Beside him Charles’ presence is palpable in the dark, more so than just his physical body; the sense of him is expansive, rolling out and taking the measure of the night, but there are no words in Erik’s head, the touch of Charles’ mind as light as possible without being nonexistent. “They’re in Raven’s house,” he says, withdrawing back into himself like a flower rebudding, blooming in reverse. Erik can hear the raucous sound of the nephilim’s voices now, getting louder as they walk - there is a sense of space, and he guesses they are in the village square, crossing the wide expanse between buildings together under starlight he can almost - but not quite - remember the feel of on his skin, too delicate for human nerves.

Charles slips his hand to Erik’s elbow and guides him up one, two steps onto a creaking wooden porch which groans beneath their weight, and the people inside go quiet for a moment before devolving into frenzied muttering as Charles knocks on the door.

When it opens there’s one loud exclamation of “I don’t see why - ” from Alex before Raven is saying, from much closer, “Hello.”

“Hello,” Charles says, warm and charming, with a rustle as he folds his wings neatly back and away, suitable for indoors. “Sean invited us to join you, I hope that’s alright.”

“Hi Erik! Hello Charles,” Sean pipes up from somewhere inside, and the girl shuffles her foot, a quiet rasp of scales on wood, before saying, “Of course, angel. Please come in.” 

Erik follows when Charles tugs, feels stupid and vulnerable with his eyes covered, is sure he can feel their stares on him and the scarf tied around his face before he’s pushed into a seat, his hands laid on the back by Charles so that Erik sits on it properly instead of missing. Charles himself pauses only a moment before folding to the floor at Erik’s feet, the warmth of his body leaning back against Erik’s legs. He pushes down his hood from his hair and the fabric falls in light folds between them, catching on Erik’s calves and pillowing Charles’ neck. “Chairs are difficult with these,” Charles says, disarmingly charming, his hand coming down to rest on Erik’s ankle. “Thank you very much for this, all of you. I haven’t eaten human food before, it should be interesting.”

“Really?” Hank asks, his voice coming from across the fireplace from where Erik and Charles are sat, getting closer as he must lean forward. “What do angels eat, then?”

“They don’t,” Charles says, as the rest of them shuffle about. “I must say, I’d be interested to know if nephilim eat differently to pure humans - do you eat more or less, do you think?”

“Oh, rather more I should say - ”

“There’s enough to go around, if that’s what you’re asking,” Alex says, and there’s a clatter at the fireside of metal on pottery, something falling from one to the other, liquid moving - then something is colliding with Erik’s hand where he’s settled it on Charles’ shoulder, and he jerks and nearly knocks it from Alex’s grip, only just catches it before the bowl slops all down Charles. “Careful!”

“It wasn’t.” Charles steadies Erik’s bowl before letting go, takes his own with a murmur of thanks. “I can see that you’re all very capable, Alex. I apologise if I’ve given a different impression.”

There’s a background rattle of bowls as Alex goes on handing out the food, and Erik adjusts his grip, tries not to look as self-conscious as he feels, blinded and uncertain of where, exactly, his dinner is. The spoon at least he can recognise from the shape of the metal as it is pressed into his grip, and he lowers it into his bowl carefully, scoops up some of the thin liquid and raises it slowly to his mouth. It’s some kind of broth, tastes of some kind of vegetables - no meat, and he’s suddenly immensely grateful for that, for not having to decide whether or not to eat it in front of Charles. It’s not bad, and when he goes for a second spoonful he takes some of the heavier part this time, keeps it slow and steady to make sure he doesn’t miss his mouth.

“You’re quiet,” Raven says, from over to his left, and Erik startles, nearly dropping his spoon. She laughs, bright and only a little forced. “You’re like one of those hunting birds lords have, that go to sleep when you put a hood on them.”

“Does that make me the lord?” Charles might sound to the others like he’s laughing, too, but Erik feels Charles’ hand tighten on his ankle, fingers pressing around the jutting bone there like jesses. “Perhaps I should have worn gloves.”

He thinks of all those captive birds, tied to one place and time, only let off their leash when it suits their master, and feels cold. “Nobody tells me where to stoop,” Erik says.

Raven must catch the tone of his voice, because when she says “Everyone’s here,” she has dropped the teasing. “Sean and Armando, and Alex and Hank and me. Just so you know.”

“I still don’t understand why Erik has to wear the blindfold and we don’t,” Sean says, voice muffled by a mouthful of dinner. “I mean, if we’re half-angels and all, shouldn’t we all be wandering around going ‘my eyes, my eyes!’ and gibbering or something?”

The fire crackles in the sudden silence, which is broken by Armando saying, “I don’t really understand any of it, if I’m honest.”

Erik puts down his spoon in his bowl, pinning the handle against the side. “The simplified version is I killed a man like you.” There’s a part of him that is awaiting their judgement, equally wanting both to be judged and refusing it, but he cannot see their faces to see their reactions, can only speak into the void between them all, the fire crackling to his side and Charles shifting against him, twisting to look up at Erik. “He destroyed a city full of regular people, just because he could, and I took the sword to him, to stop him. I had not been ordered to. I was punished.”

“This is when you were an angel?” Armando asks, and Erik nods. “Yes.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with the blindfold,” Alex says. “Or with our powers.”

“It has nothing to do with you.” Erik breathes slowly, in and out, and stays calm as he says, “I was an angel before. I had eyes that could see the truth of things, and you can’t put the blinkers back on once they’ve been removed. I see Charles - any angel - for what they really are. I see their Grace, which is God, and no mortal can see that and stay sane. I can see, and I am mortal. Ergo.”

“But we can’t?”

“Are you mad?” Erik snaps, and feels the spoon bend in his grip, the metal suddenly fluid to his touch in his anger. “No? Then no, you can’t See. It’s not complicated.”

“But if he was killing people, surely stopping him was a good thing?” Raven’s voice is soft. “If he killed a whole city.”

“Angels aren’t supposed to make their own choices,” Charles says, equally softly, and reaches for Erik’s hand, lacing his own fingers between Erik’s to open up his fist, draws it down to lie across Charles’ collarbone, above the beat of his pulse. “Right and wrong are not our decisions.”

“Then you’re allowed to be here?” Hank asks. Charles says nothing. “Oh,” says Hank, as though he has suddenly understood something, and Erik flattens his palm against Charles’ chest, keeps his chin high and defiant despite the blindfold and his disadvantage. “I didn’t know angels could love one another.”

“If angels couldn’t love, none of you would be here,” Erik says, and after a long silence Charles says, “Human food is strange.”

It’s a welcome change of subject. The nephilim laugh, loud and awkward, and the conversation turns to their chores.

“I hunt,” Armando says, with a creaking sound as though he’s leant back in his chair. “Meat, obviously, but we sell the pelts down in the city when we go down there, too. Got a bear, once, that was a tough fight.”

“One the bear lost,” Alex says, and the others laugh. “Sometimes we sell the carpentry stuff, but it’s hard to get it down there. We’ve taken some commissions for Hank to do nice copies of books and shit, that’s usually pretty good.”

Armando makes a noise of agreement. “Not so much recently, but there used to be more scholars in the city than soldiers.”

“I make cheese,” Raven says, in a voice that dares anyone to make something of it, but clearly the boys know better than to poke fun.

“You’re all very industrious,” Charles says, and Erik can practically hear him beaming like a proud father as he leans forward, but the subtle sense of him in Erik’s head is genuinely interested, the way Charles always is in everyone. It would be loathsome if he weren’t so earnestly likeable. “Sean, what do you do?” 

“Makes a nuisance of himself,” Alex says before Sean can answer, and there’s a loud “Hey!” and a scuffle of limbs on floors and bodies that threatens to turn into a fight until Erik clears his throat.

Charles interrupts before Erik can say anything. “How did you all meet, anyway?”

“Well…”

“It’s not a secret from _Charles_ ,” Sean says, sounding winded.

“It’s not a secret from anyone,” Armando says, with such authority that the rest of them quiet down almost immediately, like a gaggle of children waiting for a story. “Alex and I met in jail down south. We were both being tried for witchcraft, so they threw us in together to see what we’d do, and what we did was realise we were both freaks or changelings or demons or whatever you wanted to call it, so we teamed up and broke out.”

“My little brother was a freak too, before he died. So we figured there might be more of us, so we kept an ear out for rumours and found Sean in some fancy monastery for boys with high voices - ” There’s a dull thump and a squawk from Sean, followed by an oof from Alex. “Unfortunately.”

“Asshole.”

“They call you the screaming beast for a reason.”

“ _As I was saying,_ ” Armando interrupts, “We broke out, and then we found Sean, thank you Alex. Hank and Raven were already together - ”

“Not like that!”

“Shut _up_ , Raven! Anyway, they found us, somehow. And here we are,” Armando finishes, and despite all the interruptions nobody else says anything for a long moment, as though waiting for Charles’ judgement.

“I think my - mum? Dad? Helped us,” Hank says quietly, sincerely. “I had these dreams, of where to go. They started after I turned. But I couldn’t go into the towns because people were afraid of me. I got stones thrown at me a few times.”

“It’s a cheerful little tale,” Raven says brightly, too brightly. “And now Erik’s found us, and he’s here and grumpy! And sometimes Charles is here and friendly. So we all found each other and now we’re one big dysfunctional freaky family.”

“Not as freaky as your cheeses,” Sean says, Raven, taken off guard, shrieks with outrage, and the moment is broken, turns innocuous and unburdened by old pain.

It has, however, given Erik something to think about.

 

 

**XLV**

 

Charles stays for three days this time before they’re interrupted.

They spend most of it waiting for Erik’s human body to recover between bouts of desperate lovemaking, unable to keep up with Charles’ limitless energy and utter control of every cell of the homunculus he has built for himself to interact with Erik. Charles watches him sleep, sometimes, sometimes wakes him up because he wants to be sure Erik will wake up if prompted, or because he has had a wonderful thought, or because he wants to tell Erik he loves him and kiss him until Erik is awake enough to respond. 

Erik teaches Charles to bake potatoes, eats them anyway when they come out either burnt or half-raw, sprinkled with cheese and boiled beans. Charles eats his own and says that eating seems a little tedious, really.

Charles tells Erik that they still talk about his disobedience in Heaven, discuss him in corners and whispers, debating the rights and wrongs of it between themselves. Erik says it is foolish to whisper when your Father is omnicognizant, and distracts Charles from tormenting him further with a kiss.

Sean comes back each day, and each day Charles sends him away. Erik feels badly about it, but then Charles stoops over him again and he cannot pull away, cannot do anything but reach for Charles once again, pull him in close into their tiny universe of two.

It can’t possibly last. 

Ororo comes to fetch Charles on the third day, and she lets herself into the house as easily as she had always come to Erik when he had been an angel, simply puts out her hand for the handle and opens the door, steps inside and closes it neatly behind her. Erik hears her step on the threshold from where he’s sat by the fireplace with Charles, who has somehow acquired a book and is reading to him, stroking Erik’s head back from his forehead with his free hand. Erik hasn’t taken the blindfold off for hours, is content there in the dark so long as they are together.

“What are you doing here?” Charles asks, and it should sound fierce but instead it comes out plaintive, his hand flying to Erik’s to grasp it tightly - too tightly. The bones grind together and Erik makes a little grunt of pain that Charles barely seems to register, his grip not loosening in the least.

“What are _you_ doing here?” Ororo’s voice is enough to jolt Erik bolt upright, apprehension singing in his body and tensing all of his muscles, pulling on his tendons until every bone is in alignment, until he feels like he might snap. She steps closer, makes no attempt at being quiet now. “Charles, this is madness. You’ll be cast out with him if you keep this up.”

“I love him,” Charles says simply, and Erik feels a wing sweep out around him, encircling him and hiding him from Ororo’s gaze, pulling him closer. “Nothing Father or Metatron or anyone of the Host can say can change that. Of course I’m here. Where else would I be?”

The air tastes like electricity. Every hair on Erik’s body is standing to attention, rising slowly from the skin to prickle, sensitive and wavering, against the static charge of Ororo’s emotion. “You know full well you have duties to fulfil in Heaven,” she says, stopping just out of Erik’s reach, her bare feet slapping against the wooden floor. “I shouldn’t be the one telling you this! You were the ones who taught me about duty, about obedience and the greater plan, and yet here I am, lecturing you on Eve’s great sin! For Father’s sake, Charles, as much as I love Erik, you cannot let him drag you down, too. The apple had two bites taken, and the second was made for love.”

“Do not lecture me on sacrifice,” Charles says, and turns his face away from her to hide it in Erik’s hair. “Do not tell me I cannot even keep him company for the little time we have left. I won’t do it, Ororo. It’s little enough to ask.”

“Charles, you sent him to a village of the _nephilim!_ You are staying among them right now! It’s not simply a question of time - you must know that they’re saying if they give Erik enough time he could build an army of these halfbreeds! And you in the middle of it, a full angel, is only making it more likely that a reckoning will fall on them all. Do you really want that to happen?”

Erik hadn’t even thought of that, and the realisation jolts through him like a bolt of lightning - of course that is what they will think, what they will think of him. He raises a hand to push Charles’ wing down and away from his face, the feathers soft against his fingers. “I have no interest in that, Ororo, as you and all the Host should know! Wasn’t Schmidt clue enough that I have no great love for the nephilim?”

“And yet you’ve replaced me with one,” Ororo says, and there is a ringing silence, after, in which nobody says anything at all as her breathing heaves and gasps, raw and uneven.

The sound of fabric on fabric as Erik stands is loud and rough, clothes brushing against themselves and Charles’ arms falling away, fingers dragging across Erik’s body. He wishes with vicious force for the blindfold to be gone, to be able to look at her as he speaks. “I haven’t replaced you, Ororo. I promised to show Sean smithing, that’s all.”

“You abandoned us,” she says, and he can hear the rustling of her drawing up to her full height, can imagine the stubborn set of her mouth. “You turned your back on all of us, on all of Heaven, Erik. Don’t give us a reason to do more than has already been done. Charles, you have to come back with me or they’ll send someone far worse than me to fetch you, and they won’t be so gentle as I am.”

The bones in his hands creak against one another as they tighten into fists at his sides, trembling with rage and hurt. “You know why I did it. It wasn’t idle amusement, Ororo, the man was killing humans in their hundreds and we did _nothing_ \- ”

“I won’t have this argument with you, Erik. It’s pointless, it achieves nothing but letting you bury yourself in justifications for your crime instead of accepting what you did was wrong. Schmidt’s sins do not expunge you of yours - it’s not a comparison-based system.”

“Then why are you tarring the whole village here with Schmidt’s brush?” Charles asks, and he stands as well, getting to his feet with a rustle of cloth and feathers, voice taut with emotions held in by the thinnest of barriers. “Both of you, judging them all based on the sins of other nephilim instead of seeing them for who they really are. Would a merciless killer come to Erik’s door every day and go away hangdog because Erik doesn’t come teach him? Would a vicious fiend have said ‘goodness gracious’ when Erik threatened him with a sword instead of launching at him with the extremely sharp fangs and claws his angelic blood has so kindly furnished him with?” A snort, derisive and darkly amused. “Ororo, you and Erik are so alike sometimes it makes me want to weep, for as much as I love Erik you have every inch of his stubbornness.”

And neither of them can gainsay that, for both of them are struck similarly speechless, Erik’s mouth falling open on an objection he cannot form, tongue like lead in his head. There is nothing he can say to that that will not sound all too much like an excuse or a lame attempt at proving himself right in the face of unavoidable truth.

Erik has been committing the very sin he accuses Ororo of, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Ororo says nothing, either, and he can imagine the fury she must be feeling, tempestuous as she is, to be left robbed of speech.

“Erik, why don’t you go find Sean and get out of the house for a while so I can talk to Ororo,” Charles says, and it’s not really a request. “It’ll be better for your eyes, anyway. Too long in the dark isn’t good for them.”

“So you’re keeping secrets from me now?” Erik bends, though, when Charles pulls Erik’s face down for a kiss, keeping it brief in front of Ororo.

“Not secrets, no.” Charles lets go, strokes his hands along the planes of Erik’s face as he does, as though he’s memorising it. “But there are some conversations you don’t need to be present for. Now go - I’ll be here when you get back.”

Ororo snaps, “You will not - ” before her mouth suddenly clamps shut with a loud clack of teeth, and isn’t that interesting, that Charles would use his power in such a way, Erik thinks, in a way that cannot be called anything but forceful.

He leaves, before Charles sees fit to make him.

 

 

**XLVI**

 

The basics of the different types of metals are not enough to distract him from wondering what is happening in his house, even as Sean pores over the samples of pig iron, of purified steel, pondering the variations and getting them hopelessly mixed up so that Erik has to show him which is which again, pointing out the difference in colour, in texture, that is so obvious to Erik and so invisible to the boy.

“It’s easy for you to say, it’s your gift,” Sean says eventually, propping his hands on his hips and scowling at the lumps of metal as though they’ve done him a personal injury. “I bet you could tell the difference with your eyes shut and from three feet away. I’m not stupid.”

And Erik says, in a fit of defiance, “Why don’t you see if you can tell the difference if you whistle at them?”

Sean’s eyes grow big, and he definitely isn’t stupid, because he’s smart enough to realise that Erik has just gone back on his word, just a little. “You mean… um. Yeah, I could try that. Yeah.” He turns back to the table, tilts his head to one side, and lets out a short, sharp note that rings from the iron and steel in two distinctly different tones - Erik’s not sure he hears the difference so much as feels the vibrations in the metal, but Sean seems able to tell, because he grins, wide and unfettered, and says, “That is so great! They’re totally different, I see it now,” and insists they try every kind of metal Erik has in the forge, copper and brass and the little silver brooch Raven brought him for a friend, its broken catch letting the pin swing back and forth with the force of Sean’s soundwaves.

“Good,” Erik says gruffly when they’re done, and Sean is also smart enough not to push him when Erik has voluntarily shown him something he can do with his power.

If Ororo doesn’t like it she can go hang, Erik thinks viciously, and doesn’t let himself contemplate too hard the implications of what he’s doing. Instead he has Sean sort the metals back into their receptive bins and scowls whenever he gets it wrong, tells him gruffly to practice it on his own time, and waves off his thanks with a dismissive flap of his hand.

 

 

**XLVII**

 

Every moment that he stays away is like torture, wondering what Charles and Ororo are talking about. Erik can’t help but wander close to the house several times, but there’s an aura of _go away_ that clings to it like an invisible sign, and so each time he veers away again, goes back to the smithy to find some other busywork to do with hands more apt to fidget than to do something useful

When he finally wanders past and that miasma is absent, it takes him a moment to realise it, already half-ready to leave again. Walking up to the door is like waiting for a trap to spring. “Is it safe for me to come in?” Erik calls, and there is a long silence in which he is certain Charles has left after all before he hears, “It’s safe, Erik.”

“For certain values of safe,” a second voice says. Ororo is still here, too, and barely any calmer than before.

The blindfold scarf is still slung around Erik’s neck, and he pulls it back up into place, tightening the knot at the back of his head and ensuring the sides are hooked over his ears to help it stay in place. Shutting out the sunlight is more discomforting than he had expected it would be after the past few days, but then it was easy to forget about the darkness when it meant they could be together. Now he consigns himself to the dark again of his own volition.

“This is madness, Charles,” Ororo says once Erik’s shut the door behind himself, her voice somewhere off to his right, near the window. She sounds tired, as though it is far from the first time she has said so. “They will send someone else after me, you know this - I’m only their first choice, the soft glove over the iron fist. I’m far from their last option.”

“A good thing,” Charles’ voice is to Erik’s left, getting closer, “that Erik is particularly well suited to dealing with iron fists. And there are not many who can stand up to me if I choose not to move, Ororo, and I choose to stay here. Thank you for your concern, but I’m with Erik.”

The relief that fills his lungs is palpable, and Erik feels as though this is the first time he has taken a real breath in hours, days, as Charles comes to stand at his side, the warmth of him beating against Erik’s skin. “Whether I will it or no,” Erik says, but he takes the hand that slips into his and squeezes it tightly, lifts it to his mouth to press a kiss to Charles’ knuckles, solid and determined in his grip. “Ororo, every fledgling has to fly the nest eventually, and it’s the job of a parent to let them make their own mistakes. You seem to be mistaking which of us is the fledgling and which the parent.”

She makes an exasperated noise like far-off thunder, but Erik hears the rattle of her feathers as her wings droop in defeat, recognises the concession for what it is and reaches out with his free hand. “You’re both mad,” Ororo says, but she comes to him anyway, footsteps slow at first then speeding until she is slipping past his hand entirely to embrace him, her arms going around Erik’s chest so that she can press her forehead to the hollow between his collarbones, the thick prickle of her electric aura rubbing against his skin and threatening a shock. “I can’t watch you do this to yourselves, Erik, I can’t. I won’t be back.”

His hand slips easily free of Charles’ as he reaches up to embrace her, tentative at first, then firming when she doesn’t knock away his affection. “I understand.”

“I don’t think you do. But there’s only so long I can keep beating even my hard head against a brick wall,” and she pulls back, away, out of his reach, fingers curling once in the fabric of his shirt before she lets go entirely, a farewell all of its own. “Goodbye, Erik. Goodbye, Charles. Try not to get smote down until I’m far enough away not to smell you burn.”


	3. I've looked at clouds from both sides now

 

 

**XLVIII**

 

“Well,” says Charles, once Ororo has left, “that went well.”

Erik snorts, reaches out for Charles’ hand again, pulls him closer and rests his chin on Charles’ shoulder, tucking his nose into Charles’ loose curls, breathes in and out and tries not to mourn for the loss of a child who was never really his, who he lost months before, when he chose. “Did it?”

“I’m here, with you,” Charles says, wrapping his arms and wings around Erik, kissing the shell of his ear. “That’s victory enough for me.”

Erik runs his hand down Charles’ wing, strokes the sleek heavy feathers, says, “If I had to choose - Charles, if I had to choose, I’d do it again.”

“I know.” A touch, then, on the scars on Erik’s back, where he is tender and aching, but he doesn’t knock Charles away, lets him explore the ragged depressions where his own wings used to attach, before they were torn out by the roots. “If you were so uncertain that something like this could change your mind, then I could never have forgiven you for doing it.”

 

 

  
**XLIX**   


 

That night he dreams once more of Schmidt, of the city by the sea Erik had found him in by following the trail of broken bodies left behind him, fast as a thought on the wind but never fast enough.

Schmidt had just left them where they fell, save for those he’d dragged into a pile in the great square in front of the basilica, heaving them one atop the other until he had formed a mountain of them to seat him, two children for armrests and a great ox of a man to lean back against; the one thing Erik could say for the man - if you could call such a monster a man - was that he didn’t discriminate.

“Ah,” Schmidt had said when Erik landed at the foot of his corpse throne, steepling his long, narrow fingers in front of his face and smiling quietly. “I’d wondered when you might show up. Are you my father, perhaps?”

“No,” Erik had said, and had drawn his sword.

“Then I can’t think why you imagine you have any authority over me, when none of you ever gave me anything worth having.” The man’s mouth is a sour curl of red venom, his eyes dark pools in which Erik finds only more poison, and madness, besides. “It seems to me that Heaven gave up its right to judge me when it left me to find out these things I can do on my own.”

“It’s not a comparison-based system,” Erik had said, and flung himself at the nephilim.

He wakes sweating and shaking from remembered heat and radiation, the swollen, distended faces of the dead he had been forced to step over, and the utter, terrible silence of the city once he had decapitated its sole remaining inhabitant, its final king.

“Sssh,” Charles says, “it’s okay. You’re safe here with me. Go back to sleep.”

Erik sleeps.

 

 

  
**L**   


 

“No, no, put your arm into it - ”

“I am!”

“Not like that, then,” Erik says, exasperated, as Sean swings again and this time misses the iron entirely, striking off the anvil with a loud ring of metal on metal that clearly stings; he yelps and drops his hammer entirely, shaking his hand and hissing while Erik bends to pick up the fallen tool. “It’s not hard, Sean. Just hit it square and flat, in the centre. You’ll only warp the metal if you hit it off-axis.”

Sean scowls, orange brows drawing together above his freckled nose as he snatches back the hammer and adjusts his grip, adjusts it again, glaring between Erik and the metal as though that will solve anything. “It’s not that hard, Sean. It’s not that hard if you know what you’re doing, Sean. Well I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m trying - ”

Erik sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose tightly between his fingers before letting go and stepping behind his apprentice, stepping in close - “Don’t _squirm_ , Sean, I’m not going to bend you over the anvil” - and taking hold of Sean’s hand in his, wrapping his grip just below the knuckle of the lad’s thumb. “Like this,” he says, and swings the lad’s hand up and then down onto the metal, pushing the malleable edge out from under the hammer so that the whole piece gets longer, thinner. “See?”

“I think so,” Sean says, and when Erik lets go he jiggles the hammer in his grip and swings again, this time connecting solidly. “Good! That was good, right?”

“Yes, Sean, that was good,” Erik says patiently, rolling his eyes, but he steps around to Sean’s side again so he can watch from not quite so close as the lad repeats the action. “Now, it’s getting cool again, which means…?”

“We need to heat it!”

“Which means?”

“Uh… I need to go work the bellows again?”

Erik smirks and nods, folding his arms across his chest as Sean picks up the long piece of iron, clamping it awkwardly in the forger’s tongs before carrying it to the back of the forge and plunging it into the coals. “Leave enough of it out to hold onto later.”

“Got it.” Sean shifts over to the bellows and starts pumping, grunting with the effort of starting moving but quickly getting into the repetitive motion. “Hey, do you think I could maybe scream at the fire and make it get hotter? Like, blow on it?”

The coals are getting redder again, brightening from the dull, near-black colour they had been to a brighter red-orange colour as Sean keeps pumping air into the coalbed, heaving up and down on the bellows. “No,” Erik says, coming closer so he can keep an eye on things and make sure he doesn’t get it too hot. “Your power is more to do with sound than air, Sean. You may talk a lot but even you don’t make enough hot air for that.”

“Hey!” But the lad is grinning, even as sweat drips off his face and sizzles on the hot brick. “I’ve been practising the whistle thing you taught me. Getting pretty good at it, too.”

Erik huffs dismissively, glances at the coals instead of answering. “Stop, pull out the metal and let’s have a look.”

The iron is bright red, and so he has Sean carry it back to the anvil and start hammering again, with more confidence this time. “You know it was only a suggestion, I wasn’t teaching you,” Erik says gruffly after a while, once they’ve started bending the strip over around a shaper to get a good curve for the handle. It’ll make a serviceable pair of tongs, even if it is a bit crooked - a reasonable apprentice piece.

Sean looks at him sidelong, and the corner of his mouth curves upward into a cheeky smirk. “Sounded like teaching to me.”

“Well, it wasn’t. Get back to your smithing.”

“Sir yes sir!”

“And less of the lip,” Erik says, but he adjusts Sean’s grip for him anyway, shows him how to hold the bend when he takes the piece from the anvil to dunk it in the new waterbucket, letting up billows of steam that make the lad cough and curse.

Except the next day Raven is sitting in the forge too when he gets there, cross-legged on the one chair over by the woodpile, and when Erik stops to look at her she tilts her head to one side and says, “Charles tells me you’re giving out power lessons now.”

Erik reaches for his apron where it hangs on the right wall, frowning and wondering when exactly she’s been speaking with Charles. Last Erik had known Charles had been working his way through the new book Erik had acquired from Hank, sat cross-legged in the nest he’d built of Erik’s blankets in the middle of the bed, humming to himself. “No, I’m not.”

“Sean sure is whistling at random objects a lot,” she replies, swinging her leg up and over the opposite knee, curiously graceful in her movements. Raven leans forward to prop her chin on her hand, elbow on her thigh as she looks at him with raised eyebrows. “Playing favourites, angel? I thought God loved all his children equally.”

“I’m neither Father nor an angel,” Erik snaps, and realises his hands have clenched into quiet fists at his sides, his whole body tense and taut, muscles thrumming ready under his skin, though ready for what he cannot say. “Go away, Raven. The only lessons I’m giving are in metalcraft, so unless you’ve grown a sudden interest…?”

She snorts. “Suddenly I have an improved grasp of the term ‘featherbrained.’ No, I don’t want to bang hammers and make fire with you.”

“How disappointing.”

“Look,” Raven says, and uncrosses her legs, coming to her feet with an expression that is suddenly serious, no mockery left at all. “Look. I just - I’m not going to do anything bad with it. I change shape, that’s it - don’t you think if I was going to become a jewel thief or something I would have done it already? I asked Charles to help me and he said that he literally can’t, but that you could now that you’ve been demoted, and I could really benefit from some guidance, okay? And if you tell anyone I said that then I will kill you.”

Her whole body ripples and shifts, blue flooding out from the centre of her until she is blue all over, naked in his forge with eyes fixed on his, daring him to look her up and down, her mouth firm except for the tiniest of wobbles that gives away how much she wants him to say yes, how much she thinks she needs it. Erik looks, and looks, at this chameleon creature, Raven, scaled and changeable, and sees no evil, only a sharp tongue well-trained by rejection and fear of a world ill-suited to dealing with someone like her, and relents.

“Fine. But you wait until after Sean is done with his metalwork,” he says, picking up yesterday’s tongs - now utterly cool and ready for handling - and pointing at her with them, keeping his face stern to prevent her from seeing how troubled he is by his decision. “And you listen to what I have to say instead of smartmouthing me all the time, understand?”

Raven nods so quickly he worries she might hurt her neck, and her smile is probably the most genuine expression he has ever seen on her face. “Yes, fine, okay,” and she rocks up to her feet, looking as though she is considering hugging him for a moment before she dashes outside, past a baffled-looking Sean, who looks after her with raised eyebrows.

“What got into her?” he asks, and Erik just shrugs, hands him his newly-made tongs, and says, “Hang these up on your part of the wall. A tidy forge is a necessity for good smithing.”

He thinks about it while he has Sean set up some old dribs and drabs of iron scavenged from the unused houses to melt down and reuse, shows him how to use the crucible to melt it down piece by piece and pour it into the iron stone to set into ingots. Charles has always loved to teach - he’d set Erik up with Ororo as a student in the first place, having failed with her himself, so it’s not surprising that he’s interfering now. The real question is whether it’s just Raven he’s been volunteered for, or if Charles has spoken to the whole lot of them.

Sean blithely continues melting and pouring the liquid metal, humming to himself as Erik broods, only occasionally giving him instructions when he looks set to put the place to the torch.

“Did Charles put you up to asking me for smithing lessons?” he asks eventually, and Sean turns to look at him with raised eyebrows, nearly overturning his crucible until Erik quickly corrects its tilt with an effort of will.

“No, of course not,” Sean says, happily adjusting his grip and glancing down at the half-melted forks, which look more like cheese now than iron. “He did say I should ask you for singing lessons, though he was laughing at the time.”

Erik snorts, but that only brings him back to his other question. “When was that?”

“I don’t know, yesterday?”

Which was when Erik started to change his mind about teaching.Damn telepathy. “Who else has he been talking to?”

Sean shrugs, mouth quirking into an exaggerated grimace. “Are you two having some kind of married people fight? Because I don’t want to be stuck in the middle of that.”

“Never mind,” Erik says, and turns Sean back to the smithing.

 

 

  
**LI**   


 

He goes home at midday while Sean is getting his own lunch, closes his eyes and knocks on the door softly with the back of his knuckles. “Charles?”

“Stay there,” a voice calls from above his head, and then there is a soft thump from behind him on the boards of the porch, the wood flexing under his feet with Charles’ weight. “I was on the roof,” Charles says from behind him, crowding up behind Erik so they are standing close, reaching up and putting his hand over the top of Erik’s closed lids, holding them down. “On the far side, in hopes you wouldn’t come around that way. Staying inside all the time gets very tedious, but unless you wear the blindfold all the time, I don’t see how I can go outside and be sure you won’t come around the wrong corner at the wrong time.”

Erik leans back against him, and though Charles is most of a head shorter than him the angel takes his weight as if it is nothing, not so much as swaying. “I don’t know. But - I’d like you to stay, of course, but if it gets too dull for you, you can still come and go as you please, Charles.”

“Oh, I know that. But I like to be here,” Charles says, stroking his free hand around and onto Erik’s belly. “This is early, isn’t it? The sun is much higher than when you would usually be done. Or did I miss something?”

Erik shakes his head carefully so as not to dislodge Charles’ fingers pressing against his lids. “No, nothing. I came home for lunch. I thought we could eat together. It’s what human families do.”

“I could make potatoes?” Charles offers, and Erik tries not to laugh as he says “No, that would take longer than I have. I have some bread and meat, that will do.”

He feels as much as hears Charles suck in air, lungs expanding against his back where they’re pressed together, and after a long moment of silence Charles says, “You eat meat? Animals?”

Shit. Too late to take it back. The door handle opens smoothly under Erik’s touch, and he steps forward, out of Charles’ grip, tugs the blindfold up from around his neck and settles it in place. It’s a fair sight less welcome than Charles’ fingers, but it does the job. “This body needs meat to live, Charles, if I want to be healthy. So yes, I do. It’s one of the things I have had to - if you’ll excuse the pun - learn to stomach. You get used to it.”

“There are humans who don’t eat meat.”

“They live lives where they have the right foods to do so. I don’t.”

“Oh,” Charles says, and he sounds upset, disturbed. It’s strange, really, that of all the sacrifices Erik has made to his new fleshly body it’s flesh itself that seems to strike home with Charles.

“I’ll be here for the next hour or so, if you want to go out,” Erik says, and counts his steps over to the cupboard, feeling out the shelves to find what he needs. “Though it doesn’t seem to have stopped you from having a nice chat with Raven and volunteering me again. Did my ‘no’ mean nothing to you, Charles?”

“You changed your mind, don’t try and pretend otherwise.” Charles’ voice is distant, thoughtful, still somewhere over near the door. “I - I’m going to go for a wander around the village, Erik, if you’re staying here. See how everybody is.”

“Okay,” Erik says, and tries not to mind when the door shuts. At least it means he can take off the blindfold, blinking in the dim indoor light to cut himself some bread without the risk of losing a finger.

 

 

  
**LII**   


 

He and Charles trade off an hour later, when Erik has long since eaten and is sitting with his head in his hands in his one and only chair, Charles calling at the door before he opens it so that Erik has enough time to pull the scarf up. His hand brushes against Erik’s side as he walks in, but he doesn’t try to make Erik stay. There’s a sense of preoccupation that rolls off Charles, one Erik knows well - whenever Charles is troubled he retreats into his mind until he comes to a resolution, and there’s no use in trying to distract him from it.

Erik leaves him be.

 

 

  
**LIII**   


 

“Alright. Show me what you can do.”

“Like what?” Raven asks, propping her hands on her hips and rocking back and forth on her heels, blonde hair swishing with the motion.

Erik fights the urge to roll his eyes - it wouldn’t be productive, even if it would feel good. “How about you drop the mask first, let me see you.”

They’re in the clearing by the ravine, Erik sat on a stump and Raven stood in the middle, bare toes curling in the green moss underfoot. She’s blonde and flawlessly pink as ever, fully clothed - at least by appearance. Her mouth twists anxiously, and she looks as though she’s about to protest before she remembers her promise, and drops the pretence.

Underneath it all she is lapis lazuli, topaz, all the colours of blue from under the earth’s skin, and just as hidden; dragonlike and scaled, like all the beasts long since banished from the world until such time as God sees fit to loose them. If Raven is still around at Armageddon she will fit in among those creatures as a sibling, sleek and dazzlingly alien. “Why do you bother?” Erik asks, once he’s finished looking, meets her eyes again to see her staring back at him, arms obviously itching to cover herself. “Hank doesn’t hide, and nobody has any problem with him. Why do you pretend to be made of baser stuff than this?”

“Where I grew up people used to throw rocks when they couldn’t catch me and do worse if they could,” Raven says, looking away, and she does fold her arms now, hugging herself, suddenly small in a way Erik has never seen her wear before. “It’s safer. I feel… safer.”

“Raven.” Erik leans forward, waits until she looks back at him to continue. “You’re beautiful. And you’re safe here. You don’t need help with your powers - I saw you mimic Emardis exactly, I know you know how. What you need to do is stop hiding and start being. The opinions of people who will never come here don’t matter.”

“You came here.”

“I was manipulated by an angel into coming here,” Erik says, and snorts, giving her a lopsided smile. “Unless another angel sees fit to drag some poor bastard up the mountain, I think you’re safe from prying eyes.”

Raven shifts, skin flicking pink for a moment before settling back to blue again. “So you’re not going to help me?”

“I didn’t say that.” Erik stands, heaving himself to his feet and looking at the girl again, stood anxious but defiantly blue in the middle of all this green, outlined by nature, both natural and unnatural. Her hair is a red flame, shocking against the backdrop of trees. “I want you to stay yourself for the next day. Don’t put that fake face on. Tomorrow - ”

“Tomorrow? You’ll keep teaching me?”

“Don’t interrupt,” Erik says, frowning at her until she very deliberately closes her mouth, mimes buttoning it closed. “Yes, tomorrow, I want you to tell me how it felt and if it made any difference to how the others treated you. Besides, it can’t help you much keeping half your attention on keeping your mask up. I suspect you can do more than you know. So stop being a vain little thing and start wearing your beautiful face instead of the boring one. Every other human looks like a fleshbag to me, so why would you want to?”

“Other than Hank,” Raven says, questioningly, but she’s gone a darker navy that makes Erik think she might be blushing.

“Yes, other than Hank.”

“What about Charles?”

“How would I know? I can’t look at him,” Erik says, and he can’t stop himself from sounding bitter, lets out a low laugh as he turns away and wipes a hand over his mouth, fingers catching in the scarf he wears all the time now, even in the slowly heating days of late spring. It’s tempting, so tempting, to drag it off and throw it over the cliff edge to be swept away by the water below; he thinks about it seriously for a few moments, tightening his grip, but really… he’d only be wasting a blindfold and have to get another one, or look and go mad. What a choice.

“I could mimic Charles,” Raven says into the silence between them, and Erik snaps “No!” before he can even think about it, snapping his head back around to fix her with his fiercest glare. “No!”

She flinches back, hands coming up defensively, and Erik feels like the worst kind of bully. “Okay, okay! I won’t, I promise I won’t,” she says, and slowly lowers them the longer Erik looks at her, fear easing into pity. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Erik says gruffly, and lets go of the scarf, lets his hands fall to his sides. “I’m heading back. We’re done for today.”

The walk back to the village is quiet, only Raven’s footsteps behind him - near silent, she has a gift for stealth - for company as she keeps slightly behind him. But as they get closer, it doesn’t get any noisier - there should be some sounds, at least, of the others, and Erik frowns, picking up the pace. “Raven, ignore what I said. Put your game face on,” he says over his shoulder, and, eyes wide, she does as she’s told, shifting easily into her pink, human-looking self.

It’s near-silent among the houses, and Erik waves at Raven to keep back as he walks slowly through, keeping his eyes wide open, looking for movement but finding none. He’s come in near to Hank’s place, and notes with grim interest that the door and shutters are all closed, keeping out prying eyes, though everyone else’s are open as usual.

He hears the voices before he sees the men they belong to, and pauses around the corner from the village square, listening.

“His Majesty commands that each town and village sends their young men to fight for our nation in solidarity, to protect us from our enemies and defend the realm,” one voice says, projecting out loud and strong, making sure his words carry. “It is an act of honour, and duty demands - ”

“His Majesty never does anything for us,” someone else says, and Erik recognises Alex’s voice with a low groan he stifles, leaning back against the wood of the house and rolling his eyes Heavenward. “We get no protection, no aid - we’re outcasts. Why should we give him anything when he gives us nothing?”

“As subjects of His Majesty, you are duty-bound to honour his right to call on you - ”

“Like Hell - ” There’s a scuffle, and then one of the soldiers says, “Hey, look at this brand - this one’s - ”

There is a loud sound of swords being drawn, and Erik swings around the corner, raising his hands to ward off weapons as best he can - he pushes them back towards their owners, who stumble but do not fall. His power has not returned as much as that. There are two men with their arms pinning a shirtless Alex - damn - to the stone of the well, his head dangling into the deep hole and his feet kicking wildly at the men restraining him, cursing and spitting as he struggles. Erik can see the lad’s chest starting to glow, and so he steps forward again, says, “Calm down, Alex,” keeps from shouting with an effort of will. “What is all this?”

There are two other men in armour stood by the well, clad in helmets, breastplates and chain mail underneath, swords half-pulled from their sheaths. As Erik couldn’t even have said which human realm he stood in, he has no idea who the insignia on their tabards belongs to. The other two boys are stood in front of them, Sean and Armando’s postures screaming defiance that the soldiers’ leader reads as clearly as Erik, his mouth pinched and sour. “And who are you?” the man asks as Erik walks forward to take up position directly in front of him, folding his arms across his chest. The soldier glances at Erik’s arms and shoulders and adjusts his grip on his sword, clearly deciding Erik is dangerous.

“I’m the blacksmith. What’s going on?”

“We told everyone to come here. Where were you?”

“In the woods. What’s going on?”

The man puffs up with self-importance, even his thick black beard seeming to inflate with him. “We’re here to gather recruits for His Majesty’s army to help in the war effort, but when we found this one - he’s a wanted fugitive from the law, and we’ll be taking him back for the justice he’s been evading.”

Alex swears and kicks, but he’s stuck, though the soldiers holding him are starting to look sweaty and overheated, worry pinching their brows. 

“Erik, they’ll kill him!” Raven says, clapping a hand to her mouth as she steps up to stand beside him, horror making her voice tremble.

“No they won’t,” Erik says, and when the man tries to draw his sword Erik draws back his arm and punches him in the face.

The soldier crumples like cheap foil, falling to his back on the ground, and his comrades shout and draw swords on Erik. Sean and Armando step forward, Armando’s hands raising into fists and Sean drawing in a deep breath. “Alex, don’t let go unless you want to kill everyone else too,” Armando shouts as Erik calls the fallen man’s sword to his hand with an effort of will, the hilt of it snapping into his palm like it was made for him, just in time to block the first man’s blow. 

Erik feels the metal coming towards the back of his head and ducks the second man’s sword, whistling through the space where his neck had been; it misses the man in front of him, but while he’s distracted Erik strikes forward and slashes the man across the belly, enhancing the blow with his power enough to leave a dent in the breastplate but not, though he puts all his effort into it, enough to cut through. There’s someone jostling at his back, and he only realises it’s Armando when he hears the lad shout and feels the change in his flesh where his spine is pressed to Erik’s, fighting off the second man. 

There’s a flash of red light, and a scream; Erik has to dive to avoid getting his head sliced in half from top to bottom, and Alex shouts, “Sorry!” as the men holding him stagger back screaming, even as he dashes in to grapple with the third man and Sean beside him with the man Erik had punched, bereft of his sword but struggling with the boy anyway, Sean opening his mouth - “Don’t!” Erik shouts, seeing Raven in the same path, kicking at the men trying to get up from where Alex’s power flung them - 

“ **STOP,** ” Charles says, and his words are like gravity slamming down upon them, every person there freezing in place before being borne down to the ground under the weight of it, Erik automatically squeezing his eyes as tightly shut as he can, only a flare of brilliant white and the sweep of wings burnt into his vision and dancing as afterimages before him, leaving him shaken and terrified, stricken, paralysed. “ **LEAVE THIS PLACE,** ” and Charles’ footsteps are like thunder as he weaves between the fallen bodies on the ground to stand over Erik, his shadow falling cool across Erik’s skin.

 

  


 

The soldiers are gibbering, and they fumble loudly as they clamber backwards and away from Charles, clattering armour and disbelieving moans; then running feet, getting quieter, and the jangle of tack followed by a rapid beat of hooves Erik can hear through the earth.

“Emardis!” Charles shouts, putting a foot on Erik’s back to make him stay down, is soft, now, with him. “Come out, Emardis, I can feel your hand in this. You’ve never been one for hiding your light under a bushel.”

When Emma’s feet touch the earth there is no great sound, but Erik feels the impact of her alighting nonetheless, and hates that he is on the floor and vulnerable, grovelling as though he is afraid of her. He shoves up against Charles’ foot and is held down, pressed back to the soil with gentle but implacable force. He hears the swish of her skirts as she lets them fall, her sultry chuckle. “Oh, Carophon, do we really need to stand on ceremony? Call me Emma, please. I do like what you’ve done with the place, all these prostrate mortals bowing to you. Quite charming.”

“I’m not here to play games, _Emma_. You led those men here. Why?”

“Because I’m here to play games, of course.” She steps closer, and Erik can feel it when her shadow converges with Charles’, overlapping Erik - it feels heavy, sultry and chilling, oozing over him like rancid oil, and he shudders, tries once more to get up and is once more held down by Charles. “Why didn’t you wipe their memories of this place?”

“You know full well I can’t do that without permission,” Charles spits, and Emma laughs merrily, a sound like the ringing of bells.

“You angels and your rules and permission slips. I’d never have any fun without them! Dearest Erik, is that you on the floor playing at being a rug? How very fetching you look as a footrest, I must say. Learning your new position in life as a human?”

Charles - _growls_ , a sound Erik has never heard him make before, wings flexing and unfolding with a loud snap of air as he spreads them over Erik, cancelling out Emma’s shadow by casting his over all, burning it away. “This whole village - and Erik too - are under my protection, Emma. You have no right to him or anything here, you can have no hold or dominion here - ”

“Oh, honey,” and Erik can hear her smirking, can imagine the sullen, self-satisfied pout on her mouth, the upward-curling corners of her eyes. “If you think you can win him just because you own his heart, then just wait. You might have his love today, and tomorrow, and every day after, but time is going to own that body of his, and sooner or later Serikel will be bored of playing at being a meatsack, getting creaky and wrinkled, slowly breaking down until even death seems sweet. What do you think he will do then - submit to judgement by the ones who cast him out, on the hopes of getting into Heaven? Or make the best of things and take back what should always have been his? I _will_ have him, sooner or later.”

“Never,” Erik says to the dirt, fists clenching in gritty handfuls. “I’d rather die.”

But he can’t feel defiant when he’s being forcibly kept down, when he described humans in much the same way only half an hour before, when Emma laughs loud and full of life, endless amounts of it, will never grow old or weak. “Keep telling yourself that for - oh, I’d say the next thirty years or so. In the meantime, Charles, sugar - if you think you can keep me out, that you can occupy this whole village when these mortals are just as subject to Hell as they are to Heaven - why, that would be a violation, too, wouldn’t it? Let me have my fun, Charles. I’ll take it either way.”

“Get thee hence,” Charles snaps, and Emma laughs again, says, “Elder Brother sends his regards.” There is a great gust of air as she takes off, a sound of wings beating, and, slowly, the murmuring, scared voices of the villagers behind them, struck silent in her presence.

Erik struggles against Charles’ hold and the angel finally lets him up, lifting his foot so Erik can get his hands under him and push himself upright, eyes closed until he can tug the blindfold into place. When Charles tries to help he slaps the angel’s hands away, ignores the hurt sound Charles makes and arranges it himself, filled with fury and indignation. “How dare you - ”

“What were you thinking, you idiot?” Charles grabs the front of Erik’s shirt, dragging down on it, his voice an angry hiss. “Attacking four armed men? You’re mortal, Erik! They could have killed you!”

“Something is going to kill me, Charles. Why not them?”

“You - ” The hand in his shirt releases suddenly, and Charles makes an incoherent noise of rage, slams his fist against Erik’s chest and knocks him back a few steps. It’s like being kicked by a horse, and Erik wheezes, has to feel the pain to make sure his ribs haven’t been stoved in - they haven’t, but it’s going to leave an almighty bruise. “I need to go,” Charles says, and there is a second blast of air that’s enough to make Erik fall over, landing painfully on his tailbone and clutching at his solar plexus where the blow hit, gasping for breath.

He lies there until Raven tugs off his scarf, letting in the bright daylight to scorch his eyes and make him curse and slap at her while she keeps pulling. Once the burn dies down he can see her wry, unimpressed expression, and she meets his gaze with eyes that are gold like coins, blue just as ordered. “Good job,” she says dryly, and offers him her hand to get to his feet, pulling him upright with so little effort that Erik is impressed despite himself. She’s stronger than she looks. “They’ll be back, you know.”

“Charles always comes back. Unfortunately, so does Emma.”

She shakes her head, crimson hair flying around her worried face. “Not them. I meant the soldiers.”

Erik eases the neck of his shirt away from his skin and looks down at where Charles hit him. It’s too early for it to have bruised, but he fancies the skin looks puffy already, struck with such passionate fury. “I would have killed them if Charles hadn’t interfered, which would have prevented that issue. So don’t blame me.”

“Hmph. You’re an idiot,” she says, “so of course all the boys are going to be all over you later, asking for fight training.”

He snorts, rolling his shoulder where one of the soldiers wrenched it. “I’m glad to see respect for your teachers is still valued here on Earth.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t be asking too,” Raven says, and grins at the look on his face. “What, because I’m a girl?”

“Not at all. Because you’re afraid of your body. I’ll teach you,” Erik says, and slaps her on the shoulder as he moves past her, towards his house. “I’m going home. If they come back tonight then send someone to fetch me.”

He doesn’t sleep that night, spends the dark hours calling the stolen sword to him and sending it away again, practicing until the metal is as familiar as part of his body, until he could call it to the forge from the house if he tried.

Charles doesn’t come back.

 

 

  
**LIV**   


 

Erik goes to work before the sun is fully up, stokes the banked coals of yesterday’s fires slowly and with hard-won patience, stokes his anger and frustration with it, feeding it with single coals until the flames start to flicker and ease their way out into the pre-dawn dimness, like salamanders creeping out to heat their blood under the morning sun.

An interrupted fight has always left him feeling unfinished, unsettled and full of unexpressed energy, and he puts it into cutting sheet metal into shapes for a different kind of smithing than he’s been doing up until now.

“You’re up early,” Sean says as he saunters in an hour after sunrise, smothering a yawn behind the back of his hand and scratching at his face’s meagre attempt at stubble. “What are we doing today?”

The hammer makes a loud ringing noise every time Erik brings it down on the metal, and he uses it to punctuate his words, grunting with the effort of the swing. His arm muscles burn pleasantly with the exertion, the movement freeing up his body in a way he’s needed, hadn’t realised he’d been craving while teaching Sean. He hasn’t spent much time doing the work. “You’re filing down the new tools I’ve been making since I got here. Grab the quarter inch file and use it on the stump, you don’t need the anvil and you’ll just get in my way.”

Sean groans. “Filing?”

Erik looks up at the lad and scowls, takes the lump of metal he’s shaping back to the forge and uses the tongs to bury it in the fire, waiting for it to reheat. “You’re lucky this isn’t a big smithy. That you’re even working metal already is only because I’m not interested in spending a year making you sweep up and haul coal. Even an idiot can file rough edges. Make sure you don’t take the sharpness off the things that are supposed to be sharp or I’ll show you what they’re supposed to be like the hard way.”

“Wow. Did Charles get feathers in your breakfast or something?”

Erik pulls the iron from the flames, red hot, and slams it back onto the anvil with a bang, sparks flying where the metal strikes cold iron. “Do you want to get that file down now, or after I brand you?”

The lad swallows, eyes wide and mouth making an awkward line on his face. “Now is fine, I can do filing. I will be excellent at filing.”

“Good,” Erik says, and goes back to hitting things with his hammer.

It takes a while to bend the thick metal into the right angle, the right curve. He’d thought about trying to make a forming block first, but it would be just as hard and take just as long as hammering the metal out in the first place, and it’s a good excuse to practice using his power - Erik sweats, focusing all of his mind on the metal and pulling it into shape, dragging the concavity he sees in his thoughts into reality. Somewhere far away Sean is filing haphazardly - Erik pays him no mind, just keeps hitting things until they start to take form, until he reaches a place where all there is is metal, and rage, and the quiet space where metal sings louder than anything else, and answers him.

“Oh,” Sean says from somewhere outside of Erik’s bubble, “is it - are you making _armour?_ ”

“Erik’s making armour?” someone else asks, sounding more enthused than Sean, even, and Erik ignores them all to take the first finished plate off to the shallow water bath at the back of the smithy, dropping it in there to cool while he takes the second plate out of the fire. When he turns he sees Alex and Armando hanging around in the doorway, watching, and grunts instead of greeting them, swinging the plate down onto the shaping surface of the anvil and starting to bend it for preliminary form.

“Not for any of you,” he says between blows, once he’s called the ballpeen hammer back to him to dent out the middle and make room for his chest, round scars appearing on the metal that he’ll only have to hammer back smooth later, once the thing is the right shape. “Sean, get back to filing before I lose patience. Alex, what do you want?”

“Raven said you were teaching her,” Alex says, folding his arms and leaning against the doorframe, trying for casual, but his expression is anything but. “I want lessons, too, if you’re giving them.”

“And me,” says Armando, “though I’m not sure what there is to teach.”

“Don’t you think I have enough of you to look after already? I’m not a wetnurse,” Erik says, lifting the plate and examining the curve. It’s not pronounced enough yet, nor is it even - the right-hand side is deeper now than the left. He sets it back down and starts on the left-hand side, beating it out.

Alex swallows loudly, but eventually he says, “You stood up for me. Fought those soldiers. You didn’t have to do that, Erik. So thank you.”

When he glances up the way Alex is looking at him - grateful and uncertain and with a certain amount of hero-worship Erik doesn’t think he’s earned - is enough to turn his attention back to his work, the back of his neck hot. “Don’t mention it,” Erik says, between beats. “I’m not teaching Raven the kind of things you’re looking for.”

“He’s teaching me confidence or something, not powers,” Raven says, and wonderful, there’s a veritable crowd of nephilim children haunting his doorway watching him work, Erik thinks sourly. “I mean, look at Sean. He’s doing - Sean, what are you doing?”

“Filing,” Sean says glumly, working out the catches from the shank of the largest nail header, the one that always gets the nails stuck and bent. “There’s no powers involved.”

Erik puts down his hammer and turns to face the children with a sigh, leaning his hip against the anvil. He’s warm enough now from the exercise that the water in the bucket by the foot of the anvil is looking pretty good, soot-dirtied or not. “You asked for smithing lessons and I’m giving them to you.”

“Yeah, but then you showed me how to tell what stuff is by whistling, and I thought it was the start of a beautiful friendship where you taught me all the secrets of the world and we went on a epic quest to find the Holy Grail or something,” Sean says, letting the file and the nail header droop in his hands. He shoves a hand back through his thick ginger hair, shrugging with an easy grin as he takes in their faces. “Come on, like none of you were thinking it. Angel. Sword in the stone. Epic quests. Armour.”

Erik shakes his head, reaches for his water skin where it hangs between two chisels on the wall. “This is for when your King sends his soldiers back to kill us all for defying him.” The water is warm and stale, but it tastes wonderful nonetheless, feels better when he pours some on the back of his neck to soak the hair at his nape and the collar of his shirt. “Won’t stop arrows, but it should deflect close-combat blows.”

“Then why aren’t you making armour for us?” Raven props her hands on her hips - she’s blue today, as per instruction, good - and scowls. “Don’t we need swords deflected if they’re going to be taking a swing at us?”

“Do any of you know how to move in armour?” A series of blank faces, and Erik rolls his eyes. “Of course not. It takes muscle, and know-how. You can’t just put it on and go about your day. And besides, do any of you know how to fight? I don’t mean brawling on the ground pulling each other’s hair and calling each other nasty names, I mean actually fight.”

“Why would we?” Alex asks, “I shoot some kind of hellfire, Hank is, like, a beast-man, and Sean does his screaming and people just fall over.”

“And I bet you blow up the barn more often than each other,” Erik says, shaking his head in exasperation. “Hank’s scared of his own body. Sean has better control, I’ll grant - shut up, Sean - but you’ve never faced another man and had to make the decision that it’s you or him, and it’s going to be him, and then had to follow through. For all your posturing you’re a bunch of country bumpkins who think carrying a big stick will keep you from having your own head bashed in.”

Alex crosses his arms over his chest, scowling. “Then teach us. You can’t beat a whole bunch of men by yourself. You’re going to need help, and we’re it.”

“Unless Charles steps in,” Raven says quietly, “and we all heard what he said. If he does then he’d be breaking orders.”

“Raven’s really good with a bow,” Sean says, leaning his elbows on his spread knees. “We could make her some new arrowheads, and Alex could make arrows. Hank knows how to fletch them. And I have my whistle, and if Alex had better aim - ”

“Hey!”

“Don’t bother, Alex, we all know you don’t use your power because the last time you did we had enough charcoal for the next two years, after we put out the forest fire,” Sean continues, pointing at him with the file. “That’s not the way to go about asking Erik for stuff. You have to give him good reasons and not be an asshole. The brattier you act - ”

“Brattier!”

“ - the less likely you are he’ll do something you want.”

“You have me figured out, do you?” Erik asks, voice dry as deserts but amused despite himself, and Sean flushes, hurriedly going back to his filing, picking up the crooked set of tongs he’d made and starting on the rough edges.

The kids shuffle about amongst themselves, and he goes back to hammering while they confer, drowning out their voices with the ringing out of iron. 

He thinks of the armour he’s making, and it’s purpose, and the men he had fought - the close calls and the delicacy of this human skin, so fragile to hold in so much meat and muscle and nerve and bone, to contain so much blood and brain; he thinks of how it might have been to fight all four of them at once, had the boys not jumped in, and winces inwardly, because while he could have taken all of them in less than a breath’s time before, now he is subject to the same physical laws as humans, as the children are, and he would certainly have been hurt if not killed. Erik feels a sudden sympathy for Charles’ fear and anger that he cannot squash, because it was foolish, and headstrong, and all the same things that have always got him into trouble before and precipitated his Fall. 

Sean’s not wrong, is the problem. And neither is Alex. It simmers deep in his belly, a pit of frustration at his own limitations that he thought he had vanquished, but clearly not. And yet - Erik has never been one to shy away from an unpleasant truth.

Eventually he looks up from flattening the belly edge to find them standing in a half-arc around him, determination on their faces, and so it is with a certain cruel humour that he speaks first, interrupting Alex’s inhale. “Fine. We’ll play at nursery. But you have to listen to me. I am aeons older than any of you, and that infers a certain amount of experience which you cannot hope to match. If I say jump, I don’t want your feet touching back down until I say so.”

“That’s physically impossible,” Alex retorts before the other two shut him up, but eventually he nods, too, a certain palpable eagerness creeping over all four of them, feeding off each other.

“Now go away until after midday meal.” Erik turns back to his work. “Except you, Sean. Keep filing.”

“Smith lessons _too?_ ”

“Unless you want to stop. But then don’t come running back to start up again later,” he says calmly, fitting the two finished plates together to make sure they match. Together they’ll make a semi-articulated frontispiece to the breastplate, so they have to fit well enough to slide over one another without catching.

The sound of filing starts again, slowly, metal rasping on metal, and Erik snorts fondly - when did he become fond of Sean? - and goes for the first half of the backplate.

 

 

  
**LV**   


 

They all turn up on his porch before Erik is done eating, one after the other sidling up outside and hanging around outside trying to look disinterested and casual, but he can hear them whispering to each other as he cuts another chunk of cheese. It doesn’t have the same savour without Charles there, but he still hasn’t come back. It’s not even been a day yet - there’s no cause for concern, but Erik misses him nonetheless. Charles always says he’ll never leave Erik - this is just a brief absence, nothing more. And yet.

He draws out his lunch as long as possible to see if any of the children are brave enough to knock on his door, but none of them do, and eventually he rolls his eyes and gets up from his chair, strides over to the door and flings it open to look at all of them with an impassive expression. The way they startle and jump to their feet is amusing, Sean tripping over his own limbs before he manages to get up and Alex cursing as he jerks with surprise, dropping his whittling knife and the block of wood he was working on. The knife blade sticks in the planking of the porch, trembles with the vibration of the drop and Erik’s steps, and he calls it to his hand with an effort of will, gratified when it responds and the handle smacks into his palm.

“After the midday meal, I said,” and the four of them - no, all five of them, Hank is here, too - try not to shuffle their feet and end up doing so anyway, Hank’s eyes fixed on the knife in Erik’s hand. “Alright, then. Come on. We’ll go out to the clearing where you’re less likely to do property damage,” Erik says, handing the knife back to Alex, and walks off. He doesn’t wait for them to follow, but they do, of course, like ducklings.

A warm trickle of amusement makes its way through him at the thought, but it’s apt enough, feathers or no.

“Did Charles get back yet?” Raven asks, trotting up to walk beside Erik, and winces when she catches his change of expression, looks sympathetic, even. “I’m sure he’s just thinking? He’ll come back.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that,” Erik says gruffly, but the sour look he gives her is halfhearted at best, doesn’t put her off, and slowly the others gather up closer, too, Sean taking his other side, Alex pushing ahead as though he can’t stand walking in back any longer, striding cockily along in front without glancing back. Hank hangs somewhere behind with Armando, and Erik glances over his shoulder to make sure he’s still following - might as well take Hank too, if he’s saddled with the rest of them. Where the dark-skinned lad looks unruffled, Hank looks anxious and uncomfortable, ducking his head a little when he catches Erik looking even though he could probably pull all five of them apart with his bare hands if he wanted.

They walk through the trees and into the clearing, and Alex notices it first, curses aloud such that the others dash to catch up - the ground is torn up, Erik’s stump shattered like a dropped mug, the trees on the eastern edge crumpled and broken, leaning on their neighbours, roots exposed and dirty in the open air.

“What happened?” Raven asks, sounding shocked, as Erik steps around them all and into the clearing to assess the damage, steps over to the stump and kneels to look at it more closely. “It was normal yesterday!”

The splinters and broken shards of wood have sprayed out all over, but there’s a clear central point the size of a fist, and the earth is gouged in a way Erik recognises from more battles than he can count, the trees impacted in the way a near-invulnerable body might knock them over, like pins set up to fall.

“Charles went after Emma,” Erik murmurs, half to himself, while inside he can feel all his organs - those unwanted, fleshy things - clenching together as though in a vise or a great fist, squeezing tightly and making it hard for him to breathe. “Charles, what did you do?”

“An Angelic battle?” Armando asks from back by the treeline, steps out into the sunlight as though he expects to be attacked at any time. “Who won?”

“I don’t know,” Erik says, and stares at the impact crater of the stump for a few moments longer, while behind him the children are getting restless and uneasy, shifting from foot to foot and murmuring amongst themselves. Then he looks up and looks at the ravine, cannot help but wander over to the edge, wondering, not quite able to look over - if he isn’t there, then where is he, but if he is and Erik sees him - 

Sean steps up beside him and leans over, hand scrabbling at Erik’s chest and grabbing hold of his shirt as he leans precariously far, balanced on one foot, the other raised ridiculously behind him as though it might act as any kind of counterweight. “I can’t see anything down there. No dismembered bodies, anyway.”

Erik hauls him back upright and away from the edge, and then he leans over to look for himself, unable to help it. At first he sees nothing but spray, but the longer he looks the more he can see the rocks underneath it and the river below. Look as he might, though, he sees no sign of Charles _or_ Emma. Even the rockfalls look old, none of them fresh enough to suggest collision with a heavenly body.

The breath rushes out of him like a spirit released, and he shudders despite it as he pulls back away from the drop, raises a hand and wipes it across his face as though that will wipe away the fear and relief - vain relief, since if Charles died there would be no corpse left behind. It would dissipate like morning mist in sunlight, Charles wisping away into the air as though he had never existed at all, as though Erik had imagined him.

“Do you think he’s okay?” Raven steps forward and has her own look, arms folded across her belly protectively, shifting anxiously, scales rippling.

“I don’t know. But we’ve wasted enough time on speculation,” Erik says, pulling her back upright and spinning her to face the others. “You asked me for lessons.”

Raven peers up at him with an incredulous expression, pulling away from his hands and turning back to face Erik. “Are you seriously going to pretend you’re not freaking out? Because you’ve gone white as snow, Erik.”

The world is carrying on as normal, but everything inside Erik is still and paused, falling apart and being shored back up with iron force. He will not break down. Charles will be fine.

He bites the inside of his cheek to keep from retorting, tastes the copper salt of blood, and does not scream at her either, though he would dearly like to scream for Charles. “What would it achieve?” Erik asks, and a little of his frustration boils over into his words, makes them come out hot and fast, rapid-fire. “There’s nothing I can do except what I was planning to do, which is what Charles has been badgering me to do ever since I got here.”

“That’s pretty cold,” Alex says, and he actually looks discomforted, knocked out of his standard cocky demeanour, hands loose at his sides, standing uncertainly as though he might go back home at any moment. “Aren’t you basically married to him?”

“And how does it benefit Charles for me to stand around wailing instead of doing as he asked and training you to use your powers?” Erik calls Alex’s knife to his hand again, and it’s even easier this time, the blade singing free of Alex’s belt and winging its way into Erik’s grip so that he can bring his hand up to prick Raven’s side with the sharp tip. The girl freezes at the sting of it, though he doesn’t press. “I control my power, and I can use it. I don’t risk losing control every time I try and use it, unlike you children. Charles wants me to help you all live, and I do that by training you. Besides. Emma wouldn’t kill him. She likes playing with us too much.”

Please, Father, let that be true.

He lowers the knife and Raven darts away as soon as she feels it gone, then leans in and punches him in the arm, scowling fiercely. “What the hell, Erik. That was not okay!”

“I’ll teach you to stop me,” he says, and jerks his head towards a flatter piece of land, not yet torn up.

After a long pause, in which she looks him up and down, assessing and narrow-eyed, Raven follows, and after a moment the boys do, too, let him line them up and begin.

 

 

  
**LVI**   


 

Once they get over their initial anxiety, they are like eager puppies, hungry to show off their abilities as soon as he shows even a crumb of interest, wanting to please him. Even Alex, so worried about what he can do and about hurting people by accident, is not difficult to persuade to fire off one of his blasts across the ravine at the waterfall, which quenches it with an incredibly loud hiss and a great cloud of steam that billows out in an angry, swelling fog, rock rumbling away from the cliff wall with the force of it.

“I can’t control it,” Alex says, looking at what he’s done and chewing at his bottom lip. “It just does that, really. I’m not even sure what it is. Hellfire, maybe?”

“Hmm,” says Erik.

He has Hank run around the perimeter of the hollow the village sits in - the boy is monstrously fast, the wind of his passage enough to rock the rest of them when he reaches full tilt, finally lets go; he pulls the remnants of the broken stump out of the ground with only a minimal effort, grunting as the roots come loose, trailing dirt and insects scurrying for the nearest dark hole to hide in. Hank’s embarrassed when he sees Erik watching, though he must have known he would; he drops the stump like a hot coal, wringing his hands as though waiting to be reprimanded. 

“Can you climb?” Erik asks, and sends him off to find out.

Raven he sends after Hank, with instructions to pretend to be Erik and see how long it takes Hank to realise it’s not him. It doesn’t take long, but only because she apparently smells wrong; he notes this the way he is everything else, with all-consuming attention, because if he is concentrating on these children, these half-angel infants, then he is not thinking about Charles taking on Emma, who for all her sophisticated and feminine manners is a vicious fighter, well-known for her razor-sharp fingernails and utter lack of any sort of restraint. Charles is not known for those things, and has never needed to be, not with Erik around - except that he is no longer around to protect Charles if he needs it, and nor is Ororo.

The thought of Charles, kind, peaceful Charles - fierce in his own way, but not in Erik’s - battling a cold-hearted, unscrupulous demon like Emma is enough to put an icicle through Erik’s heart, a frozen shard of fear for his wellbeing that Erik can’t do anything about. He doesn’t have the capability any more. Erik is a liability.

Sean takes out his whistle and practises exploding trees with it, experimenting with the pitch until he finds the right tone. When Erik takes it away and tells him to try it without he grumbles and whines, but does as he’s told, pursing his lips and working at making a sound strong enough; Armando he sets to standing as a target for Sean, and under the pressure of the sound Armando changes each time, once becoming rock, another time losing his ears altogether, deaf and unaffected no matter how loudly he’s screamed at. He withstands Alex’ blasts too, sloughs them off like they’re nothing, though Erik has felt their deadly force for himself, knows how dangerous Alex’s power is.

And among them all Erik stands and watches and waits for something to happen, because either Charles will come back or Emma will, and either way he is caught in limbo, like a breath stuck in his lungs that he cannot let out.

 

 

  
**LVII**   


 

None of them is entirely hopeless. They just need some guidance, a few pointers from someone who isn’t starting from scratch and isn’t obsessed with their own uncontrolled and unquantified abilities.

Damn Charles for being right, anyway.

 

 

  
**LVIII**   


 

It’s sickening, really, how even though they have had each other all this time, each of them responds to even the grumpiest of his positive attention like flowers soaking up the sun.

 

 

  
**LIX**   


 

He remembers, once the children have gone and he has nothing else left to focus on but the nauseous feeling in his belly, with a sudden and sinking horror, Ororo’s voice shaking. _You have to come back with me or they’ll send someone far worse than me to fetch you, and they won’t be so gentle as I am._  
 _  
_That is when Erik starts calling Charles’ name - calling Emma’s name, eventually, when there is no response, when Charles does not come. He shouts it to the sky until his throat is sore and dry, until his breath comes in short, sharp pants, exhausted.

Nobody comes. Even the children leave him alone, though they must hear him.

He stays until the sky is a dark sweep above him, scattered with stars among the clouds that have moved in to rain down on his bowed and shaking head, plastering his hair and clothes to his human body, to the scars on his back that have left him forever incapable of flight and, as a result, of finding Charles.

It’s cold, and when he gets up from the ground his breeches are soaked with mud. Brushing at it with frustrated hands only succeeds in smearing it further and getting his palms dirt-smeared and dark, grit under his fingernails. In the devastated clearing - the nephilim have only left it worse, the shattered stump left lying on its side, the trees fallen victim to Sean’s scream - it is easy to feel as though he is the only person left on Earth, bathed in rain and starlight and emptied out of every feeling but the certainty that something has happened to Charles.

Even the trees seem to loom over him when he finally starts the dark walk back to the village, tripping over roots and fallen branches, the canopy of green and overlapping leaves not keeping the rain from him at all. All the lights in the houses are out or hidden behind shutters, so there is no far-off candle for a guide; he might as well be wearing his blindfold.

“Charles!” he shouts again, feeling for the next trunk edging the path, feet slipping on the wet soil. “Charles!”

And then - a sensation of faint warmth, to his left, where there is nothing but air and more rain, but he feels it anyway, licking against his skin.

Erik turns to face it, feels it like firelight on his face, inconstant and shifting. He closes his eyes and concentrates on his sense of touch, then turns the opposite direction - cold, there, a chill running through him at the contrast. Turns back, and there it is again, coaxing him forward.

The trees away from the path are more overgrown, with lower branches he does not always see in time to duck, stumbling through the undergrowth, hands out to catch himself as he works his way deeper into the wood. Rain falls all around him, pattering against the trees and the ground and Erik, a subtle curtain of sound he would not have noticed before spending so much of his time blind. He slips a few times, grazes his knees, his palms, hisses at the sting of the lost skin, the slow seep of blood. But he is getting warmer, the heat growing stronger on his face until it is like standing over the forge even as he scrambles through a patch of briars, unable to avoid getting scratched and caught by them, pulling his clothes free only by tearing them loose, too dark to see the thorns.

“Charles?” he calls again, squinting to try and see anything in the pitch black all around him, but he cannot see anything at all, just outlines, the vaguest silhouettes of trees.

Then - 

“-rik. Erik, here.”

He feels his heart stop in his chest, and Erik slips when he steps forward, a sudden slope underfoot that he slides half the way down towards the shallow dip at the bottom, gathering leaf litter and Father knows what else as he goes. “Charles!”

“I fell,” Charles says, and Erik forgets how to breathe before Charles says, “no, wait, not like that, just, from the sky. I’m still. Just. Could you help me up?”

“Where are you? I can’t see anything.”

Charles laughs, a shaky little sound accompanied by rustling, shifting cloth and limbs. “Good. Here, follow my voice.”

“What happened?” Erik asks as he picks his way across the uneven ground towards the movement, slipping and sliding in the muck. Then his hand closes on something alive, and he jerks it away before he realises it’s Charles, fingers reaching out to grasp his own and bring them back to lay on what feels like Charles’ calf, a sob echoing between them that isn’t his.

“Emma and Azazel,” Charles says, and another hand curls around the back of Erik’s neck, pulls him inexorably in until Charles’ forehead can rest against Erik’s cheek, hair dripping with water. They’re both soaked, and Erik shifts closer, until their torsos are close enough to share heat, reaches his arms around Charles to pull him in. “She must have known I’d interfere. I told them you’re mine, and to leave you alone.” He shudders, curling into Erik. 

It’s too dark to see him as anything more than an outline, and Erik keeps his eyes open, just this once, to see just the edges of Charles, the grey of his wings smearing into the thick air like fog. The sodden feathers must be incredibly heavy, he thinks, pressing his lips to Charles’ temple. 

“And?” Erik asks eventually, and he can feel Charles lift his head and look up at Erik with eyes that aren’t subject to the dark the way Erik’s are, can see his full face. There are fingers then, tracing the delicate skin of his eyelids. His eyelashes brush against them when he blinks, the touch settling at the corners of his eyes where they crease up when he frowns, rubbing across the crowsfeet there in fascination.

Charles kisses him in answer, surges up and grabs Erik’s face in his hands to press against him, mouth to mouth and chest to chest, biting at Erik’s lower lip until he opens up to let Charles in, to stroke his tongue along Erik’s and whisper - with an edge of pain, it hurts Erik to hear even as he wallows in it - his feelings mind-to-mind, radiating a kind of desperate love and devotion Erik can only accept with gratitude, return in equal measure.

“If the price of falling were less than ultimate sin, I’d do it,” Charles says when he pulls away finally, shaking. “I’d fall, even if it meant I’d die - ”

Erik kisses him again, there in the dark until he can no longer keep from shivering, and then he clambers slowly to his feet, only out of Charles’ grip long enough to reach down for him and pull him up after, close together. The angel hisses and staggers, and Erik realises then that he’s injured. “What did they do to you?” he asks, runs his hands over Charles to find out where it hurts.

Charles leans into the touch until Erik’s hands find his left wing joint, and then he jerks, sucking in his breath on a sharp, pained sound. “Metaphysically? Hard to describe. It seems to correspond to a broken wing. I’ve tried putting it back together, but it won’t stay - they must have done something to make the injury stick.”

There are feathers trailing along the ground when Erik reaches behind him to find the damage, and Charles nearly bats him away when he finds the break, bone snapped through the delicate skin on the upper arch, ragged and bleeding under his hands. He tries to be gentle, but he can tell it hurts by the awful sounds Charles makes, even as he tries to lift the wing behind it back into alignment. 

“There’s not a lot I can do for this,” he says, trying to override panic with pragmatism and mostly succeeding. “I can try and splint it for now, but it’s going to be awkward.”

“Leave it.”

His head jerks up in shock. “What?”

“I said leave it,” Charles says, but his voice sounds strangled. “It’s fine. We need to get back to the house before you catch pneumonia.”

“But - ”

“Don’t make me make you.”

Erik shifts uncomfortably, but then he shivers again, and Charles whines deep in his throat, stumbling against him. “Come on, Hank will be able to do something,” Erik says eventually, and before Charles can object Erik steps behind him and lifts the trailing half of his wing to take the pressure of lifting it off the break, though it probably hurts just as much to have him moving it. It can’t make it any worse, at least. “You can see better than I can in this. We’d better start walking.”

It’s difficult, even more so than it was for Erik to find him in the first place - Charles can see where they’re going, but with his wing and Erik stumbling along behind him, getting up the slippery slope is nigh-on impossible; they manage it somehow, dragging themselves up by roots and branches, making it to the higher ground without losing too much skin. And even then it is more of the same - a long, wet slog through the rain and the mud, while Erik keeps his eyes half-slitted in case of lightning, waiting to feel the electric build in the atmosphere that could spell disaster, but it never quite comes. 

It’s just them together in the woods, Charles trying not to let out the pained sounds he bites back, but not realising that Erik can feel it between them anyway, a constant low-level bleed of sensation Charles is projecting subconsciously. It’s almost like having wings again, broken or not, and Erik teeters back and forth between gritting his teeth to bear it and - in the smallest, most selfish part of him - never wanting it to end, though it’s hurting Charles. He feels it and hates himself for feeling it, battles it all through the long walk and only stops to curse whatever new hell it is that puts every rock in the forest in his way so that he can stub every toe he has been furnished with in turn.

They walk for what feels like hours, and possibly is. It’s hard to tell, time stretching before and after him like taffy, simultaneously endless and fleeting.

“You should go next time,” Erik says into the silence between them, when they near the edge of the trees, and closes his eyes when Charles’ silhouette starts to get clearer, then nearly bumps into him when Charles stops abruptly, turning on the spot and dragging his wing out of Erik’s hands.

He sounds furious, near spitting with anger and hurt. “What are you saying? No!”

“I don’t want them to keep hurting you for me,” Erik says simply, though it is killing him to say it - and he lifts his hands to show Charles the blood on them, where it has dripped down from the wound to Erik’s grip. “Charles, you’re going to live a long, long time. With all of them. You don’t want to be making my enemies yours forever.”

“You’re an idiot,” Charles says, and turns his back to Erik again, feathers dragging noisily along the ground. “I don’t care about any of them. Could you - could you please lift it again so we can go get Hank, and you can get inside and warm up.”

“Charles - ”

“I would do anything for you,” Charles says, and his voice breaks, shakes, as though he too is feeling the cold. “Now please, Erik. Help me.”

There is more blood again when Erik lifts the wing, the thin scabs having most likely broken open when it was pulled from his grip. It’s slippery, and he has to adjust his grip, but once he has it he says, quietly, “Go ahead.”

He keeps his eyes tight shut as they cross the village to Hank’s house, and it is only when the nephilim answers the door - “What time of night do you - oh! You’re hurt - come in, let me look at that - ” and takes hold of the injured wing that Erik has the opportunity to turn around and look determinedly away from Charles. He can see their shadows on the wall in front of him, cast by Hank’s candle, which he’s set down on the desk by his papers.

“What happened?” Hank asks, moving away from them toward the far wall and rummaging around, pulling out a few things and setting them aside. “We saw the clearing earlier, Erik thought you’d been fighting that demon woman, we were all really worried.”

“Who, Emma?” Charles sounds like he’s trying to smile, but it comes out through gritted teeth, the sound strangled by a tight throat. “It’s nothing to worry about, I just - ah, had a bit of a disagreement with her. If you could strap up the wing for me then I would be very grateful.”

“Oh, of course, I’m just looking for my sewing kit.”

“Sewing kit?” Erik asks, aghast, and only just stops himself from turning around, all of his muscles tensed to pull Charles away. “You’re going to _sew_ him back together? Like a pair of trousers?”

Hank huffs the way he always does when questioned on a topic he’s familiar with, his silhouette on the wall puffing up like a disgruntled cat. “How else am I supposed to fasten a wound closed?”

It sounds barbaric. Erik shudders at the images in his head. “Just - fix him, alright?”

“Calm down, Erik,” Charles says, and he tries to project calm, but it’s juddery and uneven, pain bleeding through underneath that he can’t hide from Erik, of all people. “It’ll be fine. Hank knows what he’s doing.”

Their shadows move closer together, Hank leaning over Charles, and Erik has to sit and listen to the stifled whimpers and cries Charles tries to keep in as Hank lifts the wing back into place, straightening it out until the bone slips back into the right position with a sickening grind that shocks a half-scream from Charles. 

Erik is kneeling at his side with eyes clamped tight shut before he even realises he’s moving, taking Charles’ hands in his and holding on, letting Charles lean into him and taking his weight.

“He’s fractured the humerus, I’m going to need to strap the wing closed,” Hank says, leaning over the two of them where they’re crouched together on the floor. “Erik, I need you to support the wing for me while I stitch, and then while I strap it up. We’ll strap the wing first, then I need to strap it to your body, Charles, to keep it still. Is that going to be okay?”

“I can hardly fly with it as it is,” Charles says, and manages a watery chuckle, his breath a ragged beat of warmth against Erik’s throat. His hands are so tight in Erik’s that Erik is losing sensation in his fingers, but he doesn’t pull away until Charles releases his hold with deliberate effort, his hands clenching immediately into fists once he no longer has Erik to hold onto. “Do it.”

The next hour is a blur, Erik’s eyes aching with the effort of keeping them closed through all of the sounds Charles makes, the sharp smell of herbs - for the pain - and then different herbs - to prevent infection - and under all of that, the sweet sickly copper smell of blood. 

He can hear the tear of the needle passing through the skin, Charles hissing as Hank cinches him shut, fur brushing against feathers where Hank has to lean in close to see what he’s doing, the feel of fur on Erik’s own skin as they kneel side by side, him supporting Charles’ wing and Hank treating it. 

It’s a relief to fold the wing down and closed once the stitching is done, and that the stitches do not pull free with the flex of the flesh, holding firm when Hank brings out leather strapping to bind the wing closed, figure-eight loops around the injury and then looping around Charles’ body, under his arms and across his chest. Hank is fascinated with the wing joints where they connect to Charles’ back, and Erik has to threaten him with injury to get him to focus on finishing what he is doing.

“You can take a look another time,” Charles promises through gritted teeth, while Hank finishes tying off the strapping, tugging on it to make sure it’s secure. “Erik, can we - ”

“I’m taking him home,” Erik says before Charles can finish, and gets to his feet, does not shake off the hand Hank cups around his elbow for support the way he once might have. Claws prick very gently at his skin, but they don’t pinch hard enough to hurt, and Erik has seen firsthand now what Hank could do, if he wanted.

He has finally come to the conclusion that even though he could, Hank quite simply never would. He may look like a beast, but he is not one of them.

“Thank you,” he says, and Hank murmurs, “You’re welcome.”

“You’re a good man,” Erik says, then, and doesn’t wait around long enough to see what Hank says to that.

It’s slow, walking back to the house, and perhaps Erik should have asked Hank to help, but they get inside eventually, fumbling around like drunks until Erik can get Charles lying down on his belly on the bed, injured wing out of the way.

He pulls the blanket around it as best he can, covering Charles to the waist, though of course the angel doesn’t sleep. It’s strange to realise that this has become his default cure for injury, he who never knew before what it was to be physically injured.

He’s going native.

“Is this what it’s always like?” Charles asks, there in the dark between them, reaching out a hand for Erik’s. “Does it always hurt like this?”

“Not all the time,” Erik answers, and sits with him until he falls asleep himself, knelt on the floor with his head leaning on the edge of the mattress, legs numb under him and Charles’ hand in his hair.

 

 

  
**LX**   


 

The thing is, in all of their long lives, nobody has ever really hurt Charles before. Erik has never had to know what to do about it until now.

 

 

  
**LXI**   


 

The human soldiers must have reached the city at the bottom of the mountain by now. Erik sits on the porch and broods about it the next day while the sun creeps up from behind the trees, nursing the thought as the landscape reveals itself in the dawn light, turning everything from grey to colour - slowly at first, until all of a sudden the sun breaks free of the horizon and pours over the forest in a flood of green, birds waking on the instant and starting to call to one another as though their neighbours might possibly not have noticed.

He nurses a mug of sloppy porridge as he thinks, laying out their problems in his mind. Azazel involving himself is never good - he likes the game too well to stop playing for anything less than the threat of total annihilation. There’s Emma to consider, too, now that she’s stepped up her little campaign, bringing the human men here to threaten the village, since Erik refuses to leave it for his own sake. And then the humans themselves, who - in much the same vein - will not take the rejection of their call to ‘duty’ kindly. Emma or no, they know where the village is now, and they can come up here just as easily if not more so than Erik did climbing the mountain in the first place. 

It would be easier if he himself weren’t the linchpin that holds all three problems together, the crux of the matter and the gravity of the system, keeping each of the three in orbit around the village, and himself. As it is, it is at least uncomplicated.

The wood under him where he sits on the steps creaks when he shifts, and Erik hisses under his breath, stiff muscles complaining after the night’s long, awkward hike, and then sleeping on the floorboards instead of in the bed. When Charles opens the door behind him Erik stays still and does not turn, just lets the angel settle against his back, leaning against his body and draping his arms around Erik’s shoulders, chin resting on the nape of his neck.

“Letting them kill you isn’t a good solution,” Charles says eventually, fingers curling in the fabric of Erik’s shirt. “It might solve the issue of Emma, but not in a way you would be around to appreciate. The humans wouldn’t settle for just you, even if you did start it. And yes, I would go back home, but I would be heartbroken and angry with you from the day you died until the Day of Reckoning, and believe you me, we would have a Reckoning. Long-term it would be bad for your eternal soul. I would have a long time to think of creative ways to hurt you the way you’d have hurt me.”

Erik snorts and lets his head fall forward to give Charles more space, a better angle to tilt his head at so that his temple is pressed to the base of Erik’s skull, listening no doubt to his thoughts. “I know. Quite aside from the possibility it would be considered a suicide and I would end up in Emma’s hands anyway, but with far less to bargain with.”

“You do have a certain talent for getting into more hot water than anybody else. Surely one cauldron at a time should be sufficient.”

“I’m an overachiever.”

“I’m really glad you started training the children after all,” Charles says, and his breath is warm on the back of Erik’s neck, his whole body a line of unnatural warmth along Erik’s back, a familiar fit like an extension of himself, a piece of metal cut to fit exactly into his angles and jagged edges, shaping himself to Erik like another half of the same creature. “You know, Erik, they all value your attention. Even if you are a terribly impatient teacher.”

Erik just grunts, not willing to concede aloud that Charles was right, but he knows Charles will hear it in his thoughts anyway.

“I think this village could be somewhere really special,” Charles says quietly. “It’s a shame there’s not - it shouldn’t be about teaching them to fight, it should be about - well. It is what it is, I suppose. Sean is coming to find you. Will you be in the smithy again today?”

“No.” Erik gets to his feet as Sean comes into view between the houses, bright hair scorchingly ginger in the sun. “The humans aren’t going to give us time for lessons in how to properly heat iron. We need to be ready. Which means training them so Alex doesn’t slice my head off by accident if it comes to a fight.”

“When it comes to a fight,” Charles murmurs, and Erik wonders when he became the one who says ‘if’, and Charles the one who says ‘when’.

 

 

  
**LXII**   


 

The children face off against one another all morning, in teams of two and three picked by Erik; it’s the best way to see how they’ll react in a confrontation, and how they work together, what they can really do. Raven, Sean and Armando work well together, the three of them quick and clever about turning their abilities against their opponents, but if Hank and Alex dared to use their own abilities it would be no contest. When he’s scrambling to get out of the way of Sean’s sonic scream Hank runs like he’s been set on fire, impossible to catch; but he won’t turn that strength on them even when Raven manages to jump on his back and wrap her arms tight around his throat, won’t pull her off the way Erik knows he could. Alex can’t use his power on his friends for fear of killing them, but he’s good at strategy - after the first few passes he predicts Raven’s next move and floors her easily. He just needs to take Hank into account more, to work as a member of a team instead of solo. And none of them have yet worked out how to counter Armando, who adapts and elides their attacks with instinctual ease, but cannot choose how he changes, is subject to his body’s control.

Sean tackles Raven into a pile of last year’s leaves, and she shrieks and smacks at him as he laughs manically, curling his head down to avoid her blows. “She’s on _your side,_ idiot!” Alex shouts, but he’s grinning too, giving Armando the side-eye.

“This isn’t a game,” Erik says, and the two of them sit up, suddenly guilty-looking, leaf litter caught in their hair and clothes. He steps forward and crosses his arms across his chest, looking down at them with exasperation. “We’re not doing this because I thought it would be fun. We’re doing this because the humans are going to come back, and they’re not going to stop because we ask them politely. They’re going to take you with them and force you to fight in a pointless war, and you will probably die defending people who cast you out, who didn’t want you, or be killed by them if they catch you out and you can’t use your abilities to defend yourselves. Do you know how nephilim go bad? They put themselves in situations where they’re forced to use their powers to save themselves, and then when they don’t have to but it’s easier, and then just because it’s easy. A battlefield is the absolute worst place for any of you to end up.”

“Then why are you teaching us to fight?” Raven asks, shoving Sean’s gangly limbs off of her and getting to her feet.

“So you don’t have to,” Erik says. “Now switch it up. Alex, you’re with Raven. Armando, you be your own team. Sean, you’re with Hank. Hank, stop avoiding confrontation and use your powers to end it before it begins, if you’re so averse to it.”

And after some grumbling, they do as they’re told and start over, but this time when Raven charges Hank he knocks her over, then is so surprised that he’s managed it that he freezes, long enough for her to whip her legs around his ankle and pull him to the ground after her.

 

 

  
**LXIII**   


 

In the afternoon they work together against Erik, and after their first humiliating defeat - all four boys thrown to the ground by the small bits of metal on their bodies, only Raven escaping by virtue of being naked in her own blue skin - they wise up, ditching their belt buckles and Alex’s knife, Sean’s whistle, in a pile on the ground, trying again for a coordinated attack. This time they end up tangling up in each other, getting in each other’s way enough that Erik can physically throw each of them down in turn with barely any real effort required. Even Hank, who could punch a hole through Erik if he tried, is ungainly enough that it’s easy to use his weight against him, let gravity bear him down, and Armando has nothing to overcome simply being outmanoeuvred.

“It’s no good tripping over someone who’s on your side,” Erik snaps as they groan, kicks at Alex’s feet when he just lays on the ground and stares at the sky with a mulish expression on his face. “If I had a sword I’d have decapitated all four of you while you fell about like idiots. Try working together.”

“We were.” Sean is rubbing his hip with one hand, wincing. “That’s going to bruise.”

Erik snorts, raising one eyebrow. “There’s four of you and one of me. And yet I’m not even trying.”

“Yeah, well, you keep telling us you’ve been fighting longer than our ancestors collectively have been alive,” Alex says, and clambers upright again, ignores the hand Armando offers him.

Erik just waves for them to get back into starting position, and raises his hands ready.

 

 

  
**LXIV**   


 

They pin him the fourth time, and struggle as he might, giving Sean a black eye in the process and Raven a fat lip, they have him trapped.

“Good,” Erik says, when they let him go. “Now do it again in pairs. Hank and Armando first.”

 

 

  
**LXV**   


 

At the end of the day Erik lets them fall to the earth and lie there like corpses while he works with the stolen sword, moving through old drills and cutting the air, sweeping through motion after motion with the eloquence of practice. It’s shorter and lighter than his own sword, and it takes a while to get used to the balance of it, the reach. He resolves to ask Charles for his proper sword back as he works, grits his teeth against a wobble in his arm and stiffens the muscle again, keeps moving.

There’s a certain kind of calm focus that comes over him the longer he spends drilling with the sword, a kind of focus he thought he’d lost with his Grace. Erik feels as though he’s floating through the patterns, this mortal body swaying through motions it has no right to recognise as well as it does, to follow through with consummate knowledge. The sword is an extension of his arm, a singing piece of his flesh, and he imagines it parting atoms along its sharp edge, slicing between them and leaving holes in the world. 

Metal is his element, and he finds it again there, after months of separation, like having his blindfold torn away, blinking in the light.

“Your sword is dripping,” Sean says from where he’s propped himself up on his elbows to watch, and Erik jolts and turns his physical gaze to the blade in his hand, which is, indeed, dripping in fat droplets to the earth below like so much silver gilt paint. The steel is bending, slowly, like a half-melted candle, the tip of it already misshapen and runnel-coated, though it’s utterly cool - there’s no heat to it at all. 

It feels fluid when he reaches out with his power, and pulls the metal back into shape, drawing up the fallen blobs - which float back to the blade, lifting in defiance of gravity up toward the rest of it - and runs his hand along the sword, reforming the metal behind it without even a whisper of a cut, until the blade is straight and true again, a little narrower and longer than it was before, perhaps, closer to his preferred balance for a sword. 

Erik lifts it to his eye and sights along it to make sure it’s straight and true, an unbearable euphoria rising inside of him like a fist uncurling, a flower blooming - here is what he has been missing, this intangible disconnect between himself and the world around him, and if it is nothing like being an angel again, just to be able to feel the metal properly again is like rain after drought, quenching the drier portions of his soul.

“Okay, that’s awesome,” and Sean is up on his feet coming to look at the sword with wide eyes; Erik lets him take it from his hands to examine it, fighting down an undignified grin as the lad turns the blade over and over, and if Erik is trying to appear stern Sean makes no such effort. “Can you - that was really amazing, Erik. I didn’t know you could do that.”

He thinks of his sword stood tall and proud in the village mounting block where Charles left it, unrusted and dew-spotted in the mornings, blade sunk deep into the earth where Erik has been unable to retrieve it, thinks of the men most likely coming up the mountain toward them at this very moment, and says, “Try focusing on what I ask you to do instead of playing around and maybe you’ll be able to do impossible things, too.”

Like pull a sword from the stone, no matter what a certain angel has to say about it.

 

 

  
**LXVI**   


 

There’s no point in trying to hide his plan from Charles - he’ll only overhear it as soon as Erik decides not to think about it, so instead Erik just goes straight to the centre of the village and walks up to the mounting block, puts his hand once more on the hilt of his sword.

Unlike the last time it feels like a living thing, recognises his hand on it and responds; like touching a bolt of lightning, it jolts through his body, and Erik grits his teeth against the judder running through them and making his enamel rattle, tightens his fingers around the grip and draws it upward.

The earth pulls back, dragging at the blade where it has taken ownership of it at Charles’ request, clutching at it. But Erik pulls, and pulls, straining, his shoulder burning, and the metal answers, dragging itself free of the soil and rock, a loud ringing noise as it comes loose, every particle of dirt falling away from the gleaming steel.

When he cradles it in his arms it quietens down like a child too long ignored, and he feels Charles’ attention on him before he’s ready to stop checking the blade for imperfections, though of course there are none. It’s the same battle-worn, practical weapon it’s always been since he forged it, marked with the scars of all of his fights. He’s never wanted to polish them out of it with his power, though he could. With no true flesh to mar, the blade of Erik’s sword is the history that could never be written on his body.

And then there is a silence as Charles’ influence is cut off from him, and Erik lifts his head to look at Emma, now sat on the stone where the sword had been.

“Hello, sugar,” she says, smiling as though she hadn’t set a bunch of humans on them only two days ago. She flicks her flowing hair back over the silky skin of her bare shoulder where the sleeve of her white gown has ‘slipped’ down, and her lips are red as blood, her eyes as blue as the sky, her hair spun gold and her skin like cream, every cliche put together until she is impossibly beautiful, calculation in every curve of her temptress’ body. When she leans forward her gown slips further, flashes the upper curve of her breast like a ripe peach, the fine hairs on her skin catching a shine like sunlight. “I see you’re standing upright today. Feeling evolved, are we? Or did your knuckles just get bruised from being dragged along the ground?”

Erik scowls, moving his hands to the hilt and swinging it into a guard position. When he sets the point against the hollow at the base of her throat there’s a moment where he wonders if it will end the same way as when she had given him back this sword in the first place - but he is stronger, now, more used to this earthly body and in tune once more with his power. “Go away, Emma.”

“A little repetitive, don’t you think?” Emma raises her hand and pushes the blade away, ignoring the slice it cuts across her palm - red blood drips onto her gown in a rain of individual droplets, streaking it scarlet, and unlike the dust this sticks, stays when she gets to her feet in front of him with a flutter of dark wings. “Erik, we don’t have to fight. We both know what the outcome of this little bout is going to be - you can train these halfbreeds as much as you want and they still won’t be ready when the soldiers arrive in - oh, about two, maybe three days if you’re lucky. Either you all die - wasteful - or you can come with me and have done with it all. Much less messy and far more efficient for everyone, don’t you think? It’ll save Charles a lot of heartache, too.”

“It would cause him more than it saved him.”

She laughs, loud and long, tossing back her head and turning her amusement to the sky before looking back at him with a sly grin. “Oh, honey,” Emma says, “do you really believe that he’d rather you were dead then knowing you were alive somewhere? Because if you really think that then you’re a fool. Charles would rather fall himself than have you die, and he’ll do it, too, if you let it get that far. Hell, I’ll help him do it.”

The sun is setting behind them, and Erik hears Charles coming though he still can’t feel his mind, hears the quiet pained noises as the angel pushes himself too hard - for Erik, always for Erik. There is a feeling like barbs catching in his chest, a tearing, rending feeling like being entangled in a briar patch, thorns through him in every direction so that he cannot pull away without ripping something of himself asunder.

“No. If it comes to that,” Erik says, “if he tries to - I will go with you, if you stop him. I’m going to fight your human puppets, Emma, and I’ll let these children fight with me. I think you’re wrong about there being no hope of victory. But if it comes to that, then stop Charles from interfering and I will be yours. For eternity, without fighting. Provided you prevent Charles from plucking this conversation from my memory, and you refuse him if he asks for your help.”

Emma smiles, broad and white with teeth that look normal but might as well be sharp as razors, and says, “Done. The pact is sealed. I’ll see you in Hell, Erik.” Then she leans to the side and peers around him at Charles, whose shadow is drawing up long alongside Erik, bound wing and all, and brings a hand to her face in a mockery of fear, eyes wide and round in fake terror. “Oh dear! Oh no! The mighty scribe Charles has come to draw a quill and spatter ink on my dress to make me go away. Erik my darling, I must flee before your lover’s fury falls on me. Until our next tryst,” and she leans forward before Erik can stop her and plants a freezing kiss on his mouth. 

Her lips are cold as ice, as cold as death, and Erik feels as though something has been drawn out of him, something vital; like the core of him has been frozen solid, turned to winter in his belly. She’s gone before he can gasp, and his breath comes out in a white cloud, frost-studded and painful.

“Erik, Erik,” Charles is saying, clutching at him from behind, and Erik lets his arms drop out of ready position, the tip of the sword suddenly heavy and dragging his hands down. His joints are creaking like old swollen wood, like cold metal too stiff to move. “Erik? What happened? It’s - she’s done something to you, I can’t - ”

“I’m fine, Charles,” Erik says, and lets his eyes fall closed, frees one hand to wrap it over Charles’. “She didn’t - it doesn’t matter.”

“Your hand is freezing! And she _kissed_ you, Erik - ”

Charles’ body is like a brand against Erik’s, and unlike this morning the heat of him is such a contrast to Emma’s utter chill that it burns, having him near almost too hot to bear. “She was just talking, Charles, trying to make me change my mind with threats and warnings. It’s fine.”

“Then why did she hide it from me?” Fists grab hold of Erik’s hair on either side, not quite shaking him but tugging hard and painful on the roots until Erik hisses in pain, leaning backward toward Charles to relieve the tension. “What did she hide from me?”

“Nothing,” Erik says, painfully bowed toward Charles, clenching his eyes tighter shut, to be certain. “She’s probably just messing with you, it’s one of her mindgames - ”

“You’re a liar,” Charles says, voice hollow, and lets go, steps back and away, the tail-end of his wing dragging on the ground and stirring up dust that Erik breathes in, choking and coughing. “What are _you_ hiding from me, Erik?”

“Nothing,” Erik lies, and he knows he deserves it when Charles leaves.

 

 

  
**LXVII**   


 

He takes the sword to the smithy and sits alone in the evening light on the cold flat top of the anvil, polishing the sword with a soft cloth; though no fingerprints have marred its surface, there’s a long trickle of blood down the fuller, striping the centre line of the blade rusty brown as it dries. It comes off easily, soaks through the cloth onto Erik’s hands, and he has to scrub a little to get it out of the whorls of his fingerprints and out from under his fingernails.

 

 

  
**LXVIII**   


 

Erik drills the children harder than ever the next day, until they’re panting and begging for a rest, and even then he allows them only five minutes; even Raven, usually impervious to effort, is sweating, her hair drenched to her head as she shifts forms mid-fight to avoid Hank’s blow and strike one back in return. They’re getting better, and at a rate he could hardly have asked to improve upon, but as Sean tackles Armando to the ground only for the both of them to lay there for long moments before staggering back to their feet, Erik can’t help but wonder if he’s sold his soul to Emma too early. 

Raven follows him to the well when he finally lets them break for the noon meal, and she leans against the stones with casual grace as Erik winds the handle to bring up a bucket of cool, earth-flavoured water and pours it over his head and neck to wash away the day’s growing heat and his fear with it. It trickles down into his shirt collar where the fabric wicks it up to lay flat and sodden across his skin, dripping from his hair and the tip of his nose, from his lips, and when Erik turns to her, finally, raising an eyebrow in silent question, the girl looks unimpressed.

“What’s the plan, then?” she asks, taking the bucket from him and tipping the other half of the water over herself, where it cascades off her scales and leaves them rainbowed and iridescent, trickling down her blue and naked body. She’s been growing more confident day by day in her own skin, until she seems as natural now as she had in her mask, and if Erik has achieved one thing here that is worthwhile it is this. “Are we just going to line up and put up our fists, or did you have an actual plan of attack?”

“I have a plan,” Erik says, shifting his weight. The length of his sword shifts against his back where he has tied it once again in lieu of the scabbard, catching on the wet fabric and dragging it along with it. “I don’t care to repeat it several times over. Wait until this afternoon.”

But Raven doesn’t go, just stares him down until she decides to speak. “Everyone has their things packed already. We’re just waiting on your say-so to leave. The longer we leave it, the more likely it is that they’ll attack before we can.”

“I’ve been waging wars since before your atoms even thought about becoming anything more than hydrogen. I know that, Raven.”

“What’s an atom?”

He gives her a sidelong look before he remembers the progress of science so far on Earth, and shrugs. “Tiny bits of things that make big things. It’s not important.”

It only earns him an unimpressed look. “You’re really weird.”

“Thank you,” Erik says dryly, and lets her hand him back the bucket to drop it back down the well where it lands, after a moment, with an echoing splash. “You have an hour. Go take advantage of my generosity.”

He eats slowly and in silence at the smithy instead of going back to the house. Charles is ignoring him and has been since the evening before, and it’s so clear that the angel is brooding and planning himself that Erik has no choice but to keep away to keep from prompting a furious argument or, worse, giving Charles the chance to dig something out of him about Emma.

That afternoon he lays out his plans to the children.

 

 

  
**LXIX**   


 

Hank has lent him some of his precious paper and ink to draw a rough map of the village and the pathway down the mountain, and if the quill pen feels awkward in hands more used to a hammer or a sword Erik gets the hang of it soon enough, making a few messy lines before gaining confidence and sketching out the round of the hollow at the top, and the long line of the path coming from it, like the root of a bulb, down toward the city. 

“Here we are,” he says, marking a sloppy X at the centre of the circle, “and here is the garrison at the city. Thanks to Armando’s scouting we know the soldiers have blocked off the path here,” and he makes another mark, “so we can assume this is where we will need to break through to get past, if they’re not on their way up already. The whole way is one long bottleneck, with no other route up or down. If we were a garrison ourselves, we could fight off any number of men from a position like this, but we’re not. Eventually we’ll run out of supplies and either surrender or die. So we need to break through before they get settled enough to stop us. We have the higher ground, but they have just as much advantage of the narrow path as we do. 

“Our best chance is to incapacitate them and get out. Killing is not the primary goal here. If we can get past them and away then that’s all we need.”

The nephilim are crowding around him where he’s laid the map out on the top of the worktable in Alex’s woodshop, jostling one another as they try to get a better look at it - not that it shows anything they don’t already know. Erik reaches for the nearest two and shoves them away, clearing himself some space and halting their bickering for the moment. “Armando, you’re to go as far as you can down without being spotted and keep an eye on them so that when we arrive we know where they are and what they’re doing. Sean, you’re going to use your voice to incapacitate as many as you can. Whether that gets all of them will depend on how many there are and how spaced out they are. Hank, Armando, any Sean’s voice weakens but doesn’t fell I want you to go after. Knock them over, toss them away, just keep them from joining the fight. Raven, the same, and if shifting will help you, do it.”

Raven accepts brusquely, and Armando just nods, sanguine as ever, but his friend is not so quiet. “What about me?” Alex asks, crossing his arms across his chest and scowling. “Don’t you have a job for me?”

“You’re our weapon of last resort,” Erik says, and reaches across the table to jab his finger into Alex’s chest, where his power comes out. “If we can’t incapacitate them, then you will.”

“And what about you?” Sean asks, fixing Erik with a pointed look. “What are you going to be doing, Erik?”

“Fighting off the ones you don’t get to,” Erik says darkly, and reaches behind his head to wrap his fingers around the hilt of his sword. “If anybody’s going to be killing anyone, it may as well be me. I have enough blood on my hands that a little more won’t hurt. And they’ll all be wearing metal.”

When Hank speaks up his voice is quiet and subdued. “Charles isn’t going to help us, is he.”

Something clenches in Erik’s stomach, but he shakes his head, letting go of the sword and taking back his crude map. “No. He can’t. And to ask him to would be asking him to go against Heaven, so don’t expect any angelic help. We don’t need it. None of you are mighty warriors yet, but you’re enough for this task.”

“When are we leaving?” Raven asks, and Erik says, “As soon as the sun sets.”

 

 

  
**LXX**   


 

He goes to find Charles in the late afternoon, when the air is tinted orange with impending night, the distance between things hard to judge suddenly in the waning light, giving everything a surreal feel, as though the world and the village on the top of the mountain with it might melt away at a touch like so much mist.

The armour weighs heavy on Erik’s body, grounding him in tight-moulded metal, rough and unsmoothed. It won’t stand up to a strong blow, the metal is too brittle and underworked for that, but he feels encased nonetheless, surrounded by something he can trust.

“Come no closer without closing your eyes,” Charles says when Erik is still stood in the shadow of the trees, a few paces from the edge of the forest where it opens up into the clearing and the edge of the ravine, and Erik tugs up his scarf once more to cover his face, folding away sight. He has to pull the ends loose from under the straps of his pack - stuffed with all of his worldly goods, which, once he has abandoned the easily replaceable creature comforts he had acquired here, is not much more than he came here with in the first place. 

He steps forward on faith, catching his foot on a root or briar but steadying himself on the trunk of a tree, sunlight hitting his face with the last burst of warmth before the end of the day.

“You’re going, then.” There’s a rustle of feathers, closer now than Charles’ voice had been, and Erik nods, unable to speak past the knot in his throat. “I can’t help you with this, Erik. I love you so much,” and there’s a hand on his cheek dragging him down into a fierce kiss, soft lips pressing hard against his as though to impress that emotion upon him by main force, like a brand; Charles’ kiss is burning, hot where Emma’s was cold, sending fire through his body and lighting every cell in him into a blaze, and even when he pulls away Erik feels scorched inside, a hot coal smouldering in his belly where Charles has implanted it, like a seed. “Don’t die,” Charles says, his mouth still so close that Erik can feel the gust of his shuddery breath, the movement of his lips against Erik’s. “I’ll find you. I’ll follow. Just don’t die.”

“Don’t follow me if I die,” Erik says, and kisses him again, desperately, hands clutching at Charles’ shoulders and pressing fingertips into the flesh there, dimpling it with his grip even as he tries vainly to remember what Charles looks like. It’s been so long that the image of him in his mind is misty and indistinct, a mess of brown hair tousled on a pillow, a wide and welcoming smile, blue eyes - blue? Yes - crinkled at the corners with affection. But the parts around that are smudged and unclear in his memory, a collection of features floating together in the void of a human memory that has never seen him with eyes made of flesh and blood. 

Charles waits until Erik has to breathe, until he pulls away to drag in air, and that’s when he says, “What did you promise Emma?”

His voice is level, but Erik’s lungs hitch anyway, catching on an inhale as Charles continues, “I know you made a deal with her, Erik. What did you promise her?”

Erik does him the dignity of not pretending ignorance, but he doesn’t answer, either, and he stands there mute, waiting to see if Charles will force him to answer.

But of course he doesn’t.

After a long minute of silence the angel finally sighs and lets go, stepping out of Erik’s grasp, and if it weren’t for the feel of his presence Erik might think Charles had left, could have been the only person left in the world, stood there alone in the dark with only the rush of the waterfall for company. “Then keep your secrets,” Charles says. “I don’t want the last thing I say to you to be angry. Don’t die. I love you.”

“I’ll try,” Erik says, and it feels like wrenching himself free of the pull of gravity, painful and difficult, but he turns his back on Charles to go to the children, and then there are hands pulling loose his scarf, dragging it down from his face and off. 

“When you break through, go west, along the base of the mountains.” Charles’ voice is heavy with things left unsaid. “I’ll give this back to you later.” There’s a sound of fabric on fabric as Charles wraps it around his own neck, rough homespun against the fabric of Heaven.

“You’d better,” Erik says, and lets the fingers tangling in the curling ends of his hair trail away down his nape and the bump at the top of his spine, leaving only a tingle behind.

 

 

  
**LXXI**   


 

In the last dying rays of the sun the children are arrayed around him, packs on their backs and if their faces are pale then Erik can forgive them their nervousness. They may have been in brawls before, and attacked for their differences, but it’s been a while and none of them have ever faced an organised enemy before, one with swords and shields and training under their belts. Even Erik, who has fought countless battles, has never done it armed with a body made of flesh that can be truly cut.

Flesh that bleeds.

“We move quickly and quietly,” he says, reaching for his sword where it’s leant against the mounting block and hefting it in his hands, judging its balance once again and finding it comforting in its familiarity. “That means you, Sean.”

“Hey!”

Erik ignores him. “I doubt we can get past them unnoticed, but if there’s even the smallest chance we should take it. We’ll meet Armando down there and take our cue from what he says. You’ll all listen to me instead of running off and getting yourselves killed. If I tell you to do something, you do it, no questions and no hesitation.”

He turns to Sean then, who despite all the blood having drained from his face and leaving his freckles to stand out like speckles of blood is still standing there, eyes wide. “Sean. I’ll go first on the way down until we get to Armando, but after that you need to take the lead. Make sure you target your voice at the soldiers and not at any of us, alright?”

“I know!” When Sean’s fists clench it reveals the new lines of developing muscles in his arms from the forge, and Erik spares a moment of regret for the tools he must leave behind, the neat little smithy he had grown used to calling his own. “I can do it,” Sean says more quietly, and Erik says, “I know.”

“Hank and I see well in the dark,” Raven says, her eyes glinting catlike yellow as the sun finally slips under the horizon and leaves them in the murky night. “I’ll go after you, and Hank at the back, to keep an eye out.”

In the absence of light the familiar village is just a collection of darker, looming shadows around them, houses ready to go to wrack and ruin once their only caretakers leave them to the mercy of the elements. “Let’s go,” Erik says, lifting his sword to sheathe it along the line of his spine in the makeshift harness he fashioned for it out of old horse tack, and leads them to the narrow entrance to the long, winding pathway down the rocky gully towards the foot of the mountain.

Once out of the hollow and into the gully the cliff-like walls to either side of them cut out almost all of the little light from the half moon and the first few stars. Only the smoothness of the path keeps them from tripping and stumbling on every step, but they still make enough noise between them that Erik worries it will carry to the soldiers down below before they’ve even reached halfway. Raven, of course, is near-silent; that unnatural grace of hers makes her stealthy, and her dark skin - he suspects darkened further for the occasion - lets her blend into the shadows as though she is part of the scenery and not something half unearthly, as though she is not there at all. By contrast the other three of them are like a herd of bulls rampaging through a city, stomping instead of creeping and grunting every time their feet come down on something unexpected, catching at one another for balance and nearly toppling over in a heap more than once.

Erik turns to glare at them, and though they cannot see his expression they are quieter after that, though they’re still not quiet enough to satisfy him.

He can feel Charles’ attention on him like a sore spot in the back of his mind, a dull, sweet ache like pressing lightly on a bruise. Even if the angel cannot involve himself, he is not letting Erik go alone, not really.

When he tries to enfold that part of his mind in his warm feelings he gets a pulse of warmth back, a deeper press that nonetheless fades too quickly.

There’s a loud scuffle from behind him, and he spins to glare at the children again, only to find Hank staring up at the sky, head tilted at an angle, as though he’s listening. “What is it?” Erik hisses, and Hank looks back down at him, fur making his silhouette a ragged outline in the dark. “I thought I heard wings,” he says, and Erik feels his own mouth tighten, draw into a long stark line. 

“Keep going. They daren’t interfere,” he says, and wonders if it’s Emma up there, or another angel, keeping tabs on them. He glances at the sky as he walks, looking for dark patches between the stars where a body might have blotted out the night, but the gap above their heads is narrow enough that he can only see a sliver of black above.

Even the sound of their breathing seems loud in the silence on the mountainside, echoed back to them from the walls like the inhales of some great beast waiting for them to walk into its gullet, as though they might already be in its narrow throat and walking unknowingly deeper inside. Here and there trees grow close enough to the edge to overhang the gully and leave them in a true darkness, and they rustle their way through years of fallen and discarded leaves, the smell of decay kicking up around them in sickly sweet clouds. It’s cold, the light of the sun having only rarely having reached the bottom, and a dry chill lingers between the cliff walls, which are now more than twice the height of a man above their heads.

One of the shadows he thought was tree branches shifts on the gully floor and moves away, turning its head and flaring a wing before pulling back from the edge. Erik grits his teeth and says nothing to the others.

It’s difficult to judge how far they’ve gone or how long it’s been, without being able to see the moon’s height in the sky. It feels an eternity before Erik hears a hiss coming from up ahead. He puts out a hand behind him to stop Raven, then reaches behind himself to draw out the long blade of his sword in a rasp of metal on leather, moving it into ready position.

“It’s me.” Armando’s voice is a low murmur above the rattle of loose stones as he comes out from a narrow hiding space in a crack of the wall, almost disappearing into the gloom save for the whites of his eyes and his teeth as he speaks. “They’re in the wider part five minutes down the gully, where the path widens into the old pool. Some of them are sleeping, maybe half, but the other half is keeping watch for ‘shrieking beasts’. They’re not too happy about being on this mountain and they’re jumping at shadows.”

Erik chooses to ignore Sean’s low cackle, says instead, “How many?”

“Twenty. All armed and armoured, even the sleeping ones.”

“Perfect.” And Erik allows himself to smile, then, at the thought of all that metal. “Alright. Sean, come here. I’m second, Armando, third - ”

“Why is Armando third?” Raven hisses, hands on her hips, and Erik says, “Because he’s immune to sword wounds and you aren’t. Any more stupid questions?”

“Then why isn’t Armando second? Or even first?”

“Because I don’t have all night to argue with you over who gets to play with the humans first,” Erik says, exasperated, “they’re not toys you have to share, Raven. Now shut up and remember that they want to kill you, and let me try to stop that from happening, alright?”

He can guess at the face she’s pulling at him, though he can’t see it; nonetheless Raven does, for once, as she’s told, and Erik checks over his troops like a row of ducklings, making sure they’re where he expects them to be. They shift restlessly under his gaze, and finally he turns back to the only one ahead of him, to Sean, who is quivering with the need to move, to get it over with. “Go,” Erik says, “Quietly, until I tap you on the shoulder. You know the plan.”

“Yeah, scream like a little girl. I think I can manage that,” Sean says, and he stumbles forward, nearly tripping before he picks his feet up and moves more quietly, as though all of a sudden he’s realised that this is real.

Erik follows, and behind him the other nephilim move, too, all of their hissing and muttering silenced at one stroke.

The path gets steadily and almost imperceptibly wider, until it’s wide enough for three men to walk abreast, and the night sky is large overhead, star and moonlight penetrating down to the ground they walk over and leaving them painfully exposed. All it would take is one sentry to have wandered up here to spot them, but they meet nobody - the anticipation is worse, almost, than having to fight.

Overhead Erik hears the beating of feathers against the air, a hollow dull slap of sound that makes him grit his teeth and push Sean onward when the lad tries to look up and find the source.

Armando hums behind them, soft and low, as they reach a corner, and they step forward around it to face the soldiers’ encampment.

It’s not a wide hollow for them to rest in, and as a result the tents are shoved in close to one another, the sleeping forms of men illuminated through the thin canvas by the campfires sheltered behind them, on the far side from the village path. As though they - or the ‘shrieking beast’ that supposedly lives on the higher slopes - might have been able to see them from up top, hidden past the ranging rocky mountainside. There are figures moving about the camp, even in the dead of night, sentries and insomniacs waiting for assault.

One of them turns to face the path, and he opens his mouth to shout but it is Sean’s voice that echoes in the dell.

It’s one big, rebounding, awful _noise_ , and even stood behind him Erik and the others wince and cry out, but Sean’s scream is too loud for their own to even register; the men at the fire fall over clutching their ears, and those sleeping awake in a panic, thrashing at their blankets and stumbling about like wounded animals. Sean’s scream dies in a rattle of a gasp, all the air pushed out of his lungs and into that one tempestuous sound, and Erik steps forward around him to meet the first man to recover, stretches out his power and finds - 

“Shit,” he says, as the man raises his sword to strike, the sheen of his scuffed, well-used armour almost invisible in the darkness, and Erik realises with sinking horror that he cannot grasp so much as a buckle on the man’s boot, that he’s cut off from his sense of metal. He almost doesn’t bring his blade up in time to block the blow, the impact of it ringing through his arm and jarring the bone as the man bears down, close enough that Erik can see his expression, clenched teeth and mad eyes, terrified still from the scream. The soldier drags his sword down along Erik’s with an unholy grind of metal on metal, and it takes a monumental effort to break free, tossing the man back and away with a grunt, kicking him in the stomach once he’s far enough away and knocking him to the ground. Erik follows it up with a kick to the head, and there’s no time to scream for Emma - that cheating bitch - before there are two more soldiers on him, their blades gleaming in the dark.

Distantly he is aware of the other kids running past him to take on their own share, Hank roaring and Raven using all her speed to avoid being struck, Armando taking on three at once, Alex at his side. There’s enough to do just beating off his own pair, and as swords jab at him from either side - he smacks one into the other, tries to get the soldiers to tangle up in each other and do his work for him, but they’re too highly trained, keep well-spaced as they harry him. It’s only the unusual length of his blade that keeps them far enough at bay, and one, two, three blows clang off his rough-made armour, denting it in against his ribs. It holds, but he’s cut nonetheless, on the upper arm and then his cheek, a furrowed gouge cut in the flesh that bleeds freely down his face, slick and hot. 

One man slips, and Erik runs him through quick as breathing, the metal sliding through the leather like hot butter, only a brief moment of resistance as it pierces skin and bone and muscle, releasing a wet gurgle from the pierced lung before the man falls, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. Behind the fallen soldier two more are running to join the one Erik is still fighting, and Sean dashes past Erik to scream at them again, but it’s a dull echo of his scream from before - he must have hurt his throat.

Erik deflects two more blows, three, shoves and grunts and bellows as his forearm is slashed shallowly open from wrist to elbow, a long, thin slice that nonetheless stings before it starts truly burning with pain, his arm sagging in its support of the sword so that his two-handed grip is uneven, and they cut his side, next, the blade punching through the armour and only just missing impaling him the way he had the first. With desperate strain Erik reaches out for metal, finds his mental fingers slipping away again and again; distantly he hears Emma’s ringing laugh somewhere far away, so close he might be imagining it if he didn’t know her well enough to know she’s nearby enough to watch what she’s wrought. Somewhere one of the children is screaming, it sounds like Raven, and Erik swings his sword hard enough to half decapitate another man, leaving himself open to the next cut, a stab to his thigh that causes him to stagger before he can straighten, blood spattering on the ground and leaving the dust a thick paste underfoot, tacky and dark.

Somewhere in that bruise at the back of his mind he can hear Charles screaming his name with desperate urgency. There is a sense of movement, then, and he thinks back _DON’T YOU DARE_ , feels the immediate response and knows he has to move fast if he’s to finish this before Charles does something stupid.

His pulse is beating hard inside of his chest, his own breathing ragged as he deflects another blow. Forced backward, he has to go on the defensive, tries not to let his leg give way as he slashes a third man open from neck to navel. Never has Erik been more aware of being flesh and bone.

Sean cries out again, but this time it sounds like agony, and Erik shouts, “Run, just run!”

There’s a blaze of light behind him that sets the tents on fire - Alex has cut loose - and then Hank is against Erik’s back, blocking him in and supporting him with the great bulk of his furred body, snarling and lashing out with his clawed hands. “They’ve cut us off,” he says between rushes, and Hank has given up, Erik can hear it in his voice, low and despairing. “Can’t you do something?”

“Emma’s cut me off from my power,” Erik manages, mechanically hacking and slashing at anything that comes at him now, already feeling lightheaded from loss of blood. “Listen. Get the others, get them out of here as best you can and I’ll - ”

“We’re not leaving you here!”

“Yes, you are,” Erik says, and he forces himself forward into the knot of soldiers at his front with a war cry, pushes away from Hank and screams with battle fury and impotent rage at Emma’s meddling.

He strikes down four of them before one of them gets him again in the bad leg, and as it folds underneath him he closes his eyes and hopes the children got away, and that it will be over before Charles arrives.

“Just say yes, sugar,” Emma says, and sometime in this whole mess she has landed in front of him, standing behind the soldiers as they lean over him frozen in slow motion, swords lowering ever further towards his kneeling body. “Say yes and it all stops.”

Erik heaves for breath in this small reprieve, feels the blood trickling out of him, slower now that there’s less of it. “You cheating bitch.”

Emma just smiles, runs her finger along the edge of a raised sword and licks the blood from her nail with a sinuous tongue. “Honey, you have to know that I always cheat.”

 

  


  


 

Somewhere in the sky there is a rushing sound, a scream stretched out by speed, and Erik knows he has run out of time.

“Just stop Charles,” Erik says, and tips his head back to bare his neck, to make it quick.

Silk brushes quietly against the dust as her bare feet pad across the blood-soaked earth, and Emma moves so smoothly around the stilled soldiers that they might as well be phantoms, coming to stand beside Erik and resting her hand heavily on his shoulder, her grip conveying the weight of mountains. “That wasn’t our deal,” she says, and bends until her hair falls like molten honey over her swanlike neck and sweeps over his face, redolent of decay and ashes. Her breath when her mouth settles beside his temple is cold against the moist surface of his eye, stings as frost forms in his lashes. “You have to say yes, darling. Take my hand.”

“I - ” Erik says, and Charles screams, “No, Erik, don’t!”

There’s a thunderous jolt of the earth like an earthquake as he lands behind Erik, the ground beneath Erik’s knees roiling and turbulent enough almost to knock him over; then Charles is snatching him back and away from Emma’s touch, slapping his forearm around Erik’s head to block his sight. Erik can hear him panting, awkward and uneven, and there is such pain in Charles that it leaks through the contact between them, his whole body off-kilter from the broken wing - how he flew despite it Erik cannot begin to imagine, the damage Charles must have made to himself immeasurable. His chest against Erik’s back is heaving with anger, as tormented as the earth. “Stay away from him, Emma, you can’t have him!”

“Say yes, Erik, and I’ll see he keeps his grace,” Emma says, and Erik says, “Charles, don’t be a fool - ”

“I can’t let you die. I’m making the only choice I can live with,” Charles says, and he releases Erik, turns to the soldiers and says, “I’m sorry.”

Erik feels his heart falter in his chest, and before he can stop himself he turns, twists to look behind himself at Charles’ face.

There is an instant where he sees - 

blue eyes in a pale face spattered with freckles,

a mouth more used to smiling than frowning, lips parting in horror - 

_Charles,_ the memory of his beloved face rushing back into Erik’s head before - 

White, a blaze so strong that Erik can’t even scream, shining through Charles’ skin and setting Erik on fire.

As he crumples he hears Emma say, over Charles’ terrified cry, “Let’s make a deal, sugar.”

 

 

  
**LXXII**   


 

He burns.

 

 

  
**LXXIII**   


 

“Hold him.”

 

 

  
**LXXIV**   


 

The ice that comes after is no better, pouring in everywhere that was on fire and burning it instead with cold, searing to the very heart of him, and Erik fights until he cannot breathe, but yet the ice comes.

 

 

  
**LXXV**   


 

Snow, everywhere, as far as the eye can see; he wanders in great white fields of it, kicking it up in drifts and wading through the deep thick blanket of winter, but when he looks behind himself there are no footprints, no tracks at all to show that he has moved.

Erik shudders with the chill and walks, and walks, until his boots are worn through and his feet are in tatters, and everywhere he goes he calls for Charles - endlessly, until he is hoarse and can only make a whisper of a sound, and even then he keeps calling out, mind and voice together.

Overhead the sky is grey as mourning, shellshocked and cracked, spiderwebbed with long black shatterlines where it’s been broken open, like an eggshell, or fragile glass; it feels like he’s been walking for years, under that splintered heaven, alone and searching. He can’t find Charles. The wind smells of scorched feathers, but there’s no smoke on the horizon, no flames he can see, though he can see for miles all around in this flat country. The sky is so big here that he feels as though he is vulnerable, exposed to whatever might come upon him from above.

And then - 

A light, on a lone hill, a far-off beacon licking at the weathered trees that surround the hilltop like a broken crown, and Erik fights his way towards it, does not notice that he climbs it in fits and starts, juddering from one step to another. All he hears is the sound of his own rough breathing, his heart beating in his chest, and when he reaches the top - 

“I win,” Emma says, and pulls him into the flames.

 

 

  
**LXXVI**   


 

Erik awakes with a scream, eyes flying open to stinging light.

“Aaagh!” Sean tips back off his chair with a loud crash and lands awkwardly, trapped between the chair and the wall with his legs still hooked over the seat. “Holy - you’re awake! It’s okay, Erik - ”

His chest is heaving from the wordless, animal screech, entangled and raw. Everything hurts. Wide-eyed and desperately happy to be able to see, Erik stares at the rough wooden ceiling, unfinished and unlovely, until his head stops swimming, then Erik manages to lift his head far enough to look down. He’s been tucked into a rough bed, clean sheets and blankets slung over his body, by the feel of it naked but for his underbreeches. His body is swathed in bandages, more of his skin covered in linen than not, but they’re clean, too, not soaked with blood. “Where,” he croaks, and is astonished to find his voice is still just as sore and raspy as it was in the - dream? Vision? Sean hands him a glass of water and Erik fights an arm free of the blankets to grab it, gulps it down before the lad can stop him. With him half-trapped on his back it runs down the wrong pipe and he chokes, the lukewarm liquid spilling over his mouth and jaw from the awkward angle - but it tastes better than anything he’s ever had, ambrosial and dusty.

The water trickles into all the tissues of his throat that are parched and dry, and though he nearly chokes again he keeps going, slowing only to breathe. 

Something tries to grab his attention, but it slips away, and Erik shakes it off in favour of drinking deep.

“We’re in this village, I don’t know the name, but, we’re there,” Sean says, once he’s taken the glass back from Erik for safekeeping, settling himself back down on his chair. He’s got bandages of his own, wrapped around his upper arm and across his forehead, dirtied from wear. “God, Erik - ”

His vision is so crisp that the shabby room seems surreal, and he considers for a moment that he might be mad, but surely if he were mad he would imagine himself an angel again, instead of this. “How is this possible?” Erik asks, looking about him at the worn-out little room. It could be anywhere, the window shows only blue sky and clouds outside. “What happened?”

Sean blanches, and it takes a moment before he opens his mouth to answer, as though he’s not sure what to say - a first sound comes out, a pause, then another attempt, “Erik - ” before he halts, head swivelling toward the door. Outside the room someone cries out, a wavering, desperate sound, and Erik feels a clumsy grab at his thoughts that slides off before it can connect, like a slippery hand. The sounds of protest get louder, a second voice begging the first to calm down. “Erik!”

It’s Charles, Erik realises with a growing sense of disorientation, Charles is out there and he sounds panicked, distraught. Only his wounds keep Erik in bed, because when he tries to fling off his covers he finds he can’t move more than that one arm, the whole of him limp and weak and battered into submission. It’s enough to make him panic, just a little, and he sounds more pathetic than he intends when his voice wavers, a yell turned into a plea. “Charles!”

Across the room something - someone slams into the other side of the door, rattles it on its hinges, and there’s a sound like someone cursing and fumbling against it, the doorhandle rattling uselessly before it finally comes free.

Erik barely closes his eyes before the door flies open, and then there’s series of thunderous footsteps across the room and a staggering weight falling on him, sprawling over the foot of the bed. Hands grab at his legs, groping their way up his body to his chest, his shoulders, his face; and when Charles whispers, “Erik, oh,” Erik feels everything in him collapse and give in to a desperate need for comfort he cannot fulfil because he cannot lift his heavy arms, the glass enough to have tired them out.

“Oh, Erik,” Charles says again, and he sounds so close to tears that Erik can’t bear it.

“How,” he manages, forces it from a throat grown tight with emotion and fear, his lids clamped so tightly shut that his face aches with it. “What?”

A hand strokes over his hair, gentle and trembling, broad palm caressing before fingers curl into his hair. “Emma saved you.” Charles shifts and the mattress rises and falls as he adjusts his weight awkwardly until he is lying half over Erik, twisted into him as though to make them fit by main force. Everywhere they touch is blazing with pain, but it is wondrous, welcome. Erik sobs as Charles says, “You’re alright, you’re fine, darling. Oh, Erik. You’re safe. I saved you.”

And everything inside Erik freezes into one solid lump of horror as he says, “Charles, what did you do?”

The face that presses into the side of his neck is smiling, even though there is clearly so much wrong; Erik can feel it, palpable between them, like blood in the water. He struggles to lift his hand from the blankets and works it over to Charles in increments, wrapping his fingers weakly around Charles’ shoulder. “What did you do?” he asks, and then his hand slips and slides further down Charles’ back, and finds -

Bandages.

“I only did what you tried to do for me,” Charles says, as Erik gropes around on his back, surely pressing on the wounds which are exactly where Charles’ wings ought to be, but aren’t.

“You made a deal,” Erik whispers, heartbroken and desolate, and opens his eyes.

“It was worth it,” Charles says, lifting his head finally, finally, and Erik looks at him for the first time in months, save for that one glimpse before his destruction. Charles is beautiful, he realises in a rush, looking at him laying there across Erik’s torso; pale as milk and smiling waveringly, as though the expression cannot hold, the waves of his chestnut brown hair framing a beloved face as familiar as Erik’s own, and as strange, because where Charles’ eyes had once been blue now they are a milky, sightless white.

They look like opals, like pearls, the corneas clouded over until there is no iris or pupil left. He blinks and it’s like his lashes occlude the moon, blind and meteorite-scarred, dented by its love for the Earth.

“It was my choice,” Charles says, as Erik lets out a broken sound like the snap of a violin string, as everything stops. “And Emma, as always, has her price.”

The door shuts quietly behind Sean as he leaves, but Charles twitches at the sound anyway, uncertain and nervous.

Erik stares, barely breathing, his mouth open on a silent denial as tears well up and spill down his cheeks, wet and warm. “I never,” he manages before his words catch in his throat, and he has to bite down hard on the inside of his cheek to keep from screaming again. “Oh, Charles, how could you.”

“How can you ask me that?” Charles tips his chin back, hiding nothing, until the light catches his sightless eyes, sheening across the opaque surfaces. “I did what you would have done, Erik, and I paid a price for it - a price I was willing to pay if it meant I could save you. Don’t you dare accuse me when you almost gave yourself over to Hell for me.”

“I’m in Hell now,” Erik says, and Charles slaps him, hard, hand clouting him across the cheekbone with a burst of intense pain that makes Erik almost pass out, all of his injuries feeding off one another and magnifying the agony. 

“I made my choice,” Charles hisses, curling over Erik as though he would be mantling his wings if he still had them, shoulderblades raised and bleeding through their bandages from the movement, fingers clenching in the thin pillow to either side of Erik’s head like claws. “You don’t get to punish me for loving you, Erik, enough to let Emma maim me to save you. If I can live with it then so can you.”

“Come here,” Erik murmurs, and Charles sinks, slowly, arms giving way and bending until he is prostrate across Erik, and he can cry freely into Erik’s shoulder, heaving with sobs as Erik brings his tender arms up to embrace him, avoiding the torn and mutilated flesh of his shoulders where Charles’ wings used to be.

 

 

  
**LXXVII**   


 

“I guess I’d better show you how to be a meatsuit,” Erik says later, and Charles laughs, half-mad with it, and says, “Yes, please.”


	4. Epilogue: Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!

 

 

**LXVIII**

 

The forest is cool and green-lit compared to the sweltering summer heat out in the open, which has fallen on the countryside like honey dripping from a spoon, thick and golden; the path is only just starting to look worn-in, the ground unused to people. Even the animals here are only as wary as they are of anything new, have not yet learned to avoid hunters. Erik is learning to use his fighting skills for more productive purposes, and if he uses a bow and arrow these days instead of his sword, then it’s something else he has to learn about being human.

“I think it’s turned out pretty well,” Alex says as they head back toward the village, swapping his axe from one shoulder to the other, swinging it easily from arms defined from constant hard work. He looks happy, these days, in a way he hadn’t before - there is a certain glow he’s gained from productivity, from being useful. It’s a good look on him, and Erik can’t begrudge him his contentment.

“The basic frame is there,” he agrees, shifting his grip on the travois to haul it around an outlying root. The firewood piled on it rattles, but the trio of conies lying on top don’t fall off, limp and already gutted. “Inside needs a bit of work before it’s finished.”

Alex snorts. “What’s to work on? It has four walls. Even a roof.”

“A bedroom would be nice.”

“So would a herd of pigs begging to be turned into bacon, but you don’t see me complaining.” Alex grins as Erik rolls his eyes, sidestepping an exasperated shove from Erik. “Fine, fine. We’ll separate off the back of it and make you and Charles a nest. We’ll send Sean off to gather some twigs and shit you can weave together, maybe some old leaves and feathers for padding. Raven can bring you some worms as a homecoming present.”

“I can still collect the bounty on your head if I turn it in with the brand attached,” Erik says as they leave the treeline, and somewhere up ahead there’s a shriek, followed by other voices laughing.

They turn the corner, through the narrow gap between rocks, and there before them is the village, a few half-finished houses clustered together with the smell of sap still hanging thickly around them from the unseasoned wood, pegged together for now with some clever carpentry until they can acquire enough metal for Erik to set up a new forge and start making nails.

“Never met a bird that didn’t taste good roasted,” Alex says, and finally takes hold of one side of the travois, helps Erik drag it off to the woodpile behind the house they’ve all been sharing up until now. It was the first one they finished, and in the weeks while they worked on the second it has been overfull of nephilim, overhot and huddled close together, getting on one another’s nerves. Once it starts cooling off for the autumn they’ll have to send Raven off to the nearest town to trade for some warmer clothes in readiness for winter, Erik thinks as they unload their haul, stacking it up against the wall of the house. Until they can get themselves established enough to be self-sufficient they’re going to be doing a lot of trading, not that they have a lot to trade. There might be a bit of thieving required until then.

Charles won’t like it, but he’ll concede the necessity when it starts getting truly cold. He makes for a catlike human, curling up as close to the fire as he can get to soak in warmth like a sponge, as though he can never get warm enough.

When they’re done Erik stands back and admires their work, fingernails pinching at the splinters lying just under the skin, trying to work them free. “We’ll move out tonight, I think,” he says to Alex, once the lad has stepped back as well, wiping his arm across his sweaty forehead. “Bedroom or not. It’ll be good to have our own space.”

Alex just laughs, raising his eyebrows and wriggling them in a way that is probably supposed to be dirty but only looks ridiculous. “Uhuh.” But he subsides when Erik gives him a dry, unimpressed look, his smile turning genuine, small but warm. “Let me know if you guys need any help, okay?”

“We’ll be fine,” Erik says, but he slaps Alex on the shoulder anyway, before going around to the front of the house.

Charles is sat on the steps of the small porch, head propped in his hand as Sean and Hank try to fit the next beam to the roof of the third house. Raven is standing on the ground below looking up at both of them and mocking Sean’s attempts at lifting the heavy wood into place while Armando gives instructions - he must have arrived back from his latest trip while Erik was out with Alex. Beside Raven’s feet little Warren is sat on the dusty floor, playing with Sean’s whistle, oblivious to the adults.

They’d found him in one of the towns they’d passed through looking for a place to start over. He’d been locked in the local church by the townspeople, set to be shipped off as some kind of gift to the Pope, where no doubt he’d have been treated as anything but a child. It had seemed… unusually serendipitous, the storm that drove them to seek shelter in that particular town, but once they’d found Warren there’d been no question of his staying there. Erik won’t pretend that Warren’s white, broad wings - large already even on a boy of four, they’ll be huge when he’s grown, his angelic parent was probably one of the seraphim - don’t wake something bitter inside of him, deep down, but it’s bittersweet. And the boy makes Charles smile.

“Hey.”

Charles turns his head towards Erik and reaches out a hand for him without getting up, one Erik takes without hesitation. “Hello, darling.” His mind is a weak brush against Erik’s, more of a caress than a connection. It’s possible that his telepathy will come back with time, the way Erik’s metalbending had, but for now Charles is severely limited in what he can do. Erik has frightened him, sometimes, coming up without announcing himself and forgetting that Charles can’t feel his presence in the same way that he used to.

“I thought you were teaching them today?” Erik says, and moves to sit down beside Charles, who immediately leans in to his side, pulling Erik’s captured hand around his shoulders. His body is a warm and welcome weight, one Erik will never get tired of. It feels strange to once more be so much larger than Charles, having got used to being smaller, in wingspan if not in mass. But he’s gotten used to it, much as he has everything else they’ve had to adapt to.

Charles ducks his head into the space under Erik’s chin. “We were. We’re taking a break.”

“A house-building break?”

“Hank is practising using his strength,” Charles says primly. “I thought this was a more useful way to spend our time than vocal coaching for Sean.”

The skin at his temple is soft and thin, and when Erik brushes the bridge of his nose against it he can feel Charles’ pulse beneath it, vital and alive, blood pumping around this mortal body of his. “Our house is ready for us to move in. We’ll be walling off the back for a bedroom, that’s yet to do, but I thought - ”

“Yes,” Charles says, and pulls his head back to turn his face to Erik, his mouth turning upward into a quiet smile. His eyes crinkle at the corners, and Erik has had long enough now to get used to the way they look just over his shoulder instead of focusing on Erik’s, the way Charles can never meet his gaze, and never will again. “Yes, please, Erik.”

They take their own things to the new house that night, refusing help from the children, though they all offer. Charles is fully capable of carrying an armful of blankets, but he needs Erik’s hand on his arm to guide him over the slightly uneven terrain, to lead him around the well they’ve started digging in the centre of the clearing. He’ll learn it, in time, along with everything else he has had to learn about being human, like knowing when to go to the privy and when to eat and when to sleep, how to dress himself. How to move his limbs and maintain his own balance. How to manage pain and tiredness and sorrow in a body that takes all of those feelings and makes them physiological instead of just emotional. How to fit himself against Erik now that they are two mammals instead of free-flitting spirits. How not to move wings he no longer has.

Erik looks at him every day, strokes his hands along the lines his eyes take and rememorises Charles’ face every morning in the dawn light before the others are awake, every freckle he’s gained from the sun that had never really warmed him before, every line and blemish from fires spitting sparks he cannot see to avoid, and Erik tries to balance two things he will never be able to reconcile: he can finally look at that beloved face, and Charles will never see Erik again.

He lies still in the mornings after he has looked his fill - he has never looked his fill, but concedes to his body’s demand to blink - and lets Charles map out the shape of his cheekbones, the swell of his brow and the bristly stubble that coats his cheeks after sleep and before shaving, lets his fingers explore - gently - the dip of his eyelids, the flutter of his eyelashes when he cannot help but twitch, and last of all the line of his mouth, his lips, parted on an exhalation of love.

 _I’d do it again,_ Charles says into Erik’s mind every morning, in the drowsy space between sleeping and waking when his telepathy is strongest, into the breathless space between them. The first day after they move into their new house he doesn’t get up, keeps Erik in bed with him by force of sloth. _Read to me?_

And Erik does.


End file.
